It is a rare occasion when a show compels its visitors to meditate equally on the breakfast table and the shrine. Yet Aurelius Kraft, the Berlin-born conceptual artist long resident in Hackney, has done precisely that in his latest exhibition Pot Pourri or Muesli, which opened this week at Pimlico Wilde Central in St James’s.
At first glance, the works consist of nothing more than a series of ceramic bowls, neatly arrayed upon linen-draped plinths. Each vessel contains a dry mixture of items, maybe flaked grains, seeds, dried fruit, petals, bark, or spice. Visitors are invited to wander the gallery and confront the challenge inscribed on the wall in stern sans serif:
“Pot Pourri or Muesli: Can you tell which nourishes and which perfumes?”
The game is disarmingly simple. One must decide, bowl by bowl, whether the contents are breakfast muesli or domestic pot pourri. Submissions are tallied electronically, and those who achieve the highest rate of correct identifications are awarded prizes at the close of each day: a small, hand-thrown bowl glazed by Kraft himself, or, for the most accurate, a year’s subscription to a “bespoke breakfast club” devised in collaboration with a Michelin-starred chef.
The conceit is humorous, but its implications are unexpectedly rich. By eroding the distinction between sustenance and ornament, Kraft asks what cultural frames make us regard one heap of oats and raisins as edible, and another heap of rose petals and clove as decorative. More unsettlingly, the viewer becomes aware that one’s confidence in classification is fragile; the boundary between consumption and display is not as solid as the morning cupboard suggests.
The most memorable piece, Bowl No. 9 (The Memory of Spice), contains a mixture that hovers uneasily between the categories. Lavender, rolled oats, candied peel, and something that might be cinnamon sit together in ambiguous harmony. I watched as a man in pinstripes confidently declared it “muesli” while a student beside him swore it was “pot pourri.” Both looked vaguely betrayed when the correct answer was revealed.
Kraft has long been preoccupied with the semiotics of the everyday. His earlier work Forks Without Plates (2017) invited audiences to eat soup without crockery, while Untitled (Apricot/Stone) (2020) arranged fruit pits in vitrines reminiscent of reliquaries. But Pot Pourri or Muesli feels sharper, more convivial, as though Kraft had decided to stage a parlour game in the heart of Westminster,and in doing so, to expose the quiet absurdities of daily life.
The exhibition rewards participation rather than passive observation; it is less a gallery show than a lightly competitive symposium. One leaves not with a secure taxonomy of dried petals and oats, but with a lingering sense of how thinly our rituals separate the sacred from the mundane. And perhaps with a complimentary packet of something indeterminate, half nourishment, half fragrance, slipped into one’s coat pocket by a smiling attendant.
Pot Pourri or Muesli runs at Pimlico Wilde Central until 26 November.