Camilla Steinum
Perception Spot

1 MAY until 13 JUN 2026
Opening – 1 MAY 2026, 6-9 pm

Perception Spot is an exhibition about our relationship to uncertainty — about how people attempt to grasp a world that resists being grasped. At Soy Capitán, Camilla Steinum (*1986, Oslo) brings together installations, sculptures and mirror works that do not describe this attempt but stage it: as bodily experience, as small ritual, as a moment in which meaning arises and slips away again.

In the installation You Can Move (2022), dark flocks of birds move through the space. Made from dyed wood and suspended on metal chains, their appearance is not fixed: depending on where you stand, the flocks change direction – crows become wild geese, one movement becomes another. Pulling gently on a lacquered wooden ball sets individual birds into motion – a casual gesture that suddenly carries wingbeat and sound into the room. The illusion depends on your own gaze; the intervention lies in your hand.

Elsewhere in the space hang heavy ropes soaked in pigmented beeswax – roughly ten metres long, suspended from the ceiling – to which handmade spheres of toilet paper and wood glue are attached. Sprayed numbers on the balls make them resemble lottery balls – objects into which hope and chance are inscribed. The vertical sequence of ropes recalls a measuring instrument, as if something could be read from it. Sensors and programmed light elements respond to movement in the space, making the boundaries between proximity and distance, inside and outside, permeable. The light flickers, the installation responds – fragile, handmade materials in tension with electronic precision.

A series of small-format mirror works carries this thought into a more intimate register. Screen-printed mirrors meet lottery numbers and zodiac signs – two systems through which people interpret chance, read fate, seek reassurance. Adhesive bandages applied to the surfaces suggest vulnerability, but also care. Standing before these works, you see your own face amid these signs – becoming part of the work without having decided to.

In Perception Spot, visitors are given a limited degree of influence: through movement and touch, processes can be set in motion whose course is never entirely predictable. Together, the three groups of works ask how knowledge comes into being – not through distance, but through participation. And they ask what people do when certainty is absent: they count, interpret, touch, hope.

Camilla Steinum (*1986, Oslo) studied at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. She lives and works in Berlin.