Found on one of the shelves, the Världens mått novel by Daniel Kehlmann re-imagines the lives of two 18th-century scientists seeking creative ways to take the world’s measure. With its numerous painted components —panels depicting books, album covers, landscapes, and buildings, alongside sculpted wooden objects from tiny figures to cigarette boxes to cars— Tom Cullberg’s work, too, evokes questions around the measurement of a time, a place, a life. Speaking to the distance between people, places, and things, physically manifested on the shelves, the work also takes measure of that distance and, in so doing, erases it. Existing in the present, it also references a past brimming both with yearning and stillness.

A time capsule of places (known and unknown), references (sometimes made up) to music and literature and popular culture, and relics of an analogue era, it is in the juxtaposition of the pieces that connections emerge, reaching out to the viewer and asking, how did we get here and where will we go?