Monika Sosnowska @ The Modern Institute

Here, as ever, Sosnowska’s inquiry into the psychology of architecture is writ large. Four architectonic structures dominate The Modern Institute’s Osborne Street space, their scale belonging to a much larger environment.

A freestanding metal industrial entranceway has been forced into a concertina shape, stretched out across the floor like a pop-up card, referencing zig-zag fire escape stairways as generic architectural tropes. It also recalls Martin Boyce’s 2009 show where he installed an upended park bench, suggestive of undulating waves, in almost exactly the same position. But unlike the tarnished, peeling bench, the surface of Sosnowska’s structures is immaculate – they have been painted after she has pushed and pulled and misshapen them.

Huge steel rods bent like plastic drinking straws are anchored inside concrete balls. The balls are gritty, as if they’ve rolled and picked up dirt. Stones, sand, coloured threads and even bits of tinsel are lodged in there, though the overall look remains industrial.

The curling black rails of a factory ramp are reminiscent of a spiral staircase or an Art Deco structure, as well as the Warsaw factory site that they reference. But the rails are cut from a flat sheet of steel, approximations not up to standard for actual use, making them model-like and suggestive of Constructivist sculpture.

Sosnowska’s reconfiguration of the structures has misshapen them far beyond use, but they couldn’t have been used anyway, being crudely joined flat cut-outs of the constructs they reference. Despite having no first-hand knowledge of these buildings, you still get a sense of the structures’ impotence and defunctness. Lifted from a precise context, copied crudely, and transported to another setting, they become so generic as to represent merely a type – a type of art, of architecture; something unknown and yet recognisable. [Jac Mantle]