What draws our attention first – the glint of a lure, or the tale it appears to promise? For Tales and Reals, Magali Reus turns to the coastal landscape of her youth, which also forms the backdrop to Museum Beelden Aan Zee, The Hague, NL. Drawing on the area’s cultural, industrial and natural landscape and history, the artist has created three interconnected bodies of twenty-one sculptural works: Merlin (2024), Streamers (2025) and Rig (2025).

At first glance, these works resemble familiar objects: larger-than-life sardine tins, maritime skeletal remains, fishing hooks and earrings. Yet a closer look makes what seems real begin to ‘reel’. Layered with meaning and alluring details, these objects use their seductive forces to hook and reel us in – literally and metaphorically. Playing with the flirtatious potential of silhouettes, they function as baits: enticements that attract us while the inevitable awaits – the moment the lure turns into a snare that fools and entraps.

Reus stages these objects within a set of charged tensions: between interior and exterior space, the domesticated and the wild, openness and confinement. For the exhibition display, each work carries its own identification code. This ordering principle echoes the opaque logic of the container-coding systems in the nearby Scheveningen seaport.

In these recent works, Reus deepens her engagement with ecology and with systems of production and consumption. As the climate emergency intensifies, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the objects we use and the produce we consume from their environmental impact, or to imagine our coastal and domestic lives without recognising multi-species relationships. Reus’ sculptures prompt us to consider the complex entanglements between nature, technology and the consequences of post-industrial human activity.