The Perimeter is pleased to present Swimming by Night, Magali Reus’ first institutional exhibition in London since 2018.

Four bodies of new and recent works – Merlin (2024), Streamers (2025), Rig (2025–26) and Subs (2026) – are brought into dialogue with site-specific wall renderings and architectural interventions. Rooted by an interest in ecology and systems of production, this exhibition speaks to the relationship between nature, technology and the impact of post-industrial human activity.

Together, these works play with the dynamics of attention, where objects become carriers of competing narratives around desire, consumption and transformation. Constructed using varied techniques of fabrication, ranging from the handcrafted to the industrial, Reus’ process unfolds through its own material language, where forms and symbols feel familiar yet not immediately determinable.

In the Rig series, wall-mounted sculptures evoke fishhooks or larger-than-life earrings. Poised between adornment and capture, they stage an underlying dynamic of courtship. A tension between openness and confinement, growth and decay, is developed in the Merlin series, which are reminiscent of empty sardine tins and discarded disposable packaging. Implements of entrapment, food preparation and storage fold into one another, creating vessels that appear simultaneously inhabited and abandoned. Through shifts in scale and arresting juxtapositions, Reus blurs the boundaries between species and their environment, habitat and object.

Positioned in parallel are the Streamers, a series of freestanding sculptures uncannily resembling both chalky fish skeletons and ailing spruce trees. While their silhouettes suggest collapse, they are not solely mournful forms; instead, they linger and lean towards celebration. Similar motifs recur in the Subs series, in which aluminium pizzabox-like shapes act as display structures for screen-printed motifs and images from Reus’ photographic archive. Swimming by Night inhabits a space between natural and mechanical worlds, revealing the entangled relationships between consumption, decay and regeneration that bind living systems to the material environments we construct.

Magali Reus (b. 1981, The Hague) lives and works in London. She creates sculptures that transform seemingly everyday objects. By detaching them from their original function, layered and complex assemblages of images and materials emerge. Instead of using readymades, Reus combines advanced technologies with traditional craftsmanship to create works that playfully reinterpret familiar elements from reality.