Cordia is pleased to welcome you to its inaugural exhibition, A Mark on the Wall, featuring works by visual artist Maria Wallace and designer Marina Melentieva, accompanied by a curated selection of conceptual and functional design objects by Charlotte Bombel, Hannah Kuhlmann and LOTTO Studio.

The exhibition takes its name from Virginia Woolf's 1917 short story of the same title, where the noticing of a small black mark on the wall leads the narrator to drift across thought and memory, musing on the workings of the mind and the narrator's interior world. Just as the stream of consciousness is a means for the author to reach into her psyche and spread out, the room in which the story takes place similarly expands, becoming a physical space in which thought can wander and an interior landscape roam free.

Cordia begins from a similar impulse to create a space that bares one's thoughts. The main exhibition room features new photographic montages by Maria Wallace, where multiple images taken from Wallace's family archive are meticulously arranged to dictate a narrative beyond the confines of a single frame. With images and subjects spanning over a century, the works play with an experience of seeing inherently shaped by memory and subjectivity. Whether we're seeing geometrically or psychologically, the photographic configurations for Wallace are more akin to educated guesses of specific moments in time: "Maybe that hour or day felt hexagonal or rectangular in spirit, was holed, swirled, stacked. And maybe now that one imagines it so, it was."

This sense of reconstruction continues in Wallace's most recent sculptural works Milchstrasse I & II (2026), made on site for the exhibition, as the artist has begun experimenting with the possibilities of polyurethane expansion foam, which is commonly used to fill gaps in building structures, such as when installing doors or windows. The artist casts the foam into molds, taken from discarded mannequins, allowing the material to expand and overpower the mold itself, ultimately uncontainable.

Marina Melentieva's Dancer IV (2026) shifts our focus towards the relationship between the scale of the room, an object and a detail. Her mobiles draw on traditional garment construction, pattern-making and ornamentation, using vintage textiles sourced from a clothing manufacturer and combining them with metal wire and other personal or found elements. Through a process of assembling, testing and responding to the material's physical behaviour, these textiles allow her to create objects that interact with a space, existing somewhere between kinetic sculptures and functional object design. In this way, Melentieva dresses the space as she would a person, playing with our expectation and association that materials and objects carry.

The presence of the gallery within a domestic interior allowed us to curate a selection of objects that would further a dialogue between visual art and functional design. As the illumination of the space opened the possibility to create a distinct and adjacent atmosphere to the main exhibition room, we are pleased to present Hannah Kuhlmann's Shell and Charlotte Bombel's Cigars, tactile objects at the intersection of industrial sculpture and light.

We are also thrilled to feature a music stand designed by Berlin-based LOTTO Studio, which will become part of Cordia's upcoming program of readings and performances. Vesper Stimuli was conceived as a delicate tool, draped with the warmth of natural rubber and held together by a cast relief of the Three Graces by Leonhard Kern, scanned from the original at the Bode Museum, Berlin.

At the end of Woolf's short story, the narrator finally discovers what the mark on the wall actually is: a snail. What remains is not the answer, but the act of creating space by looking. This exhibition is our first mark on the wall.