Paz Sher: Dumb Luck

Most objects become invisible to us once we know what they are for. A table supports, a wall divides, a pipe carries, a restraint limits movement. Paz Sher’s Dumb Luck, curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan and recently concluded at 29 Henry Street in New York, repeatedly interrupted that familiarity. Objects remain recognizable, but their assigned functions become unstable, opening a gap between what something is supposed to do and what else it might become. Sher works precisely within this gap, using dysfunction to make the familiar visible again. 

 

This shift is immediately apparent in Gambler’s Run (2025), encountered near the entrance. A table is suspended upside down, its legs extending uselessly into the air. The gesture is simple, but the inversion deprives the piece of furniture of the function through which we normally understand it. Previously exhibited upright, the work has been reconfigured for this space, where part of the ceiling has been removed to accommodate it. The architecture changes with the sculpture, while an object designed to support other things becomes dependent on another structure for its own precarious suspension. Above the viewer, the table can no longer disappear into its use. It demands to be considered instead as weight, volume, structure and balance.

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Restraint becomes more explicit in Cross Tied (2023–26). On one side of a wall, a video shows a horse tethered inside a stable, capable of movement within a narrowly prescribed radius. The monitor displaying it is itself secured, while a taut orange rope connects it to a dark horseshoe-shaped sculpture on the opposite side. Image, object and architecture are drawn into the same system of tension. Constraint migrates from the animal to the apparatus displaying it and then into the exhibition space itself. Autonomy here exists as a negotiation with whatever holds the body — or the object — in place. Rope, wall, monitor and tethered animal turn an abstract condition into a structure that can be seen and followed through space. Constraint becomes visible as a relationship, distributed among different elements of the work.

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That negotiation recurs in Untitled (Corner I & II) (2023), where forms modelled on police batons are multiplied and reorganized into sculptural clusters. Stripped of their immediate use and transformed through repetition, the batons become available to a different kind of scrutiny. The authority and violence associated with them remain perceptible, perhaps even more so once the familiarity through which we normally recognize the objects has been interrupted. Function, in Sher’s work, can conceal as much as it explains.

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The logic becomes architectural in Untitled (Wall) (2026). Few things are more visible and less noticed in an exhibition than the wall itself: its function as support depends on our looking past it, toward whatever it displays. Sher reverses that relationship by tearing the surface open and exposing its internal structure, making the architecture itself impossible to overlook. Within the cavity hang five AI-generated images, while Head Birth (2026), a divided head pierced by a metal rod, occupies the space below. The intervention gives the apparently neutral support an anatomy of its own. Across these works, functional systems — architectural, technological, institutional or bodily — become perceptible through interruption.

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Paz Sher’s installation and Fan’s curation extend this logic of visibility into the viewer’s experience. The works occupy walls, ceiling, corners and passages, and their relationships rarely reveal themselves from a single vantage point. Connections have to be discovered: the viewer changes position, follows a rope around a wall, looks upward at a displaced table, approaches an architectural opening, or recognizes that elements encountered separately belong to the same work. Sher has described the exhibition in terms of architectural intervention and questions of restraint and autonomy, while Fan’s framing introduces chance and conditions beyond individual control. The installation makes these concerns physical. Seeing becomes an incremental process, with meaning accumulating through movement and association.

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This is also where the exhibition’s interest in chance comes into sharper focus. Function organizes our relationship to an object, establishing expectations about what it does and how we encounter it; Dumb Luck repeatedly exposes the contingency of those arrangements. Fan relates the exhibition to Roger Caillois’s category of alea, games whose outcomes are determined by chance rather than skill. Sher’s works locate the limits of control in moments when established arrangements cease to hold. A table is overturned, a horse restrained, a wall breached, an object stripped of its purpose, yet each remains embedded in structures that shape what it can subsequently become. Dysfunction makes contingency visible, while disruption produces new configurations.

 

Perhaps this is why the exhibition’s transformations rarely feel definitive. Sher leaves enough of each object intact for its former function to remain legible, creating a tension between recognition and possibility. He interrupts the familiar just enough for us to see it again. In doing so, Dumb Luck draws attention to objects and, through them, to the structures that assign and sustain their functions. What looks stable, the exhibition suggests, may simply be something whose instability we have stopped noticing.

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Maurita Cardone is an Italian art journalist, critic and curator whose work explores contemporary art through the lenses of ecology, social change and geopolitics. She is a regular contributor to Il Giornale dell'Arte (the Italian edition of The Art Newspaper) and her work appeared in several international publications. ​​