Yesterday becomes today, top becomes bottom, inside becomes outside: the shift in paradigms and perspectives is the nexus of content in the solo exhibition "The Sky Opens Twice" by the Berlin-based artist duo Peles Empire, on show at the Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien (KM– Graz). Several large-format new productions toy with the perception of exhibition visitors by adapting, mirroring, and distending the venue’s architecture. The sky of the main hall on the ground level of the Künstlerhaus spreads out across the space, while a large-format piece on the exterior wall of the Künstlerhaus apse reveals a glimpse of the exhibition room inside. "The Sky Opens Twice" illustrates the variability of reality, indicating how the present—even if not always immediately apparent—draws on the past. The exhibition invites visitors to engage in dialogue and to expand the horizon.

The agenda of Peles Empire involves scrutinizing the relations between original and copy, but also repetitively applying various reproduction techniques. For over a decade now, the artist group has been devoted to the interplay between origin and repetition. Serving as a historical visual template for all of their work are photographs of Peleș Castle in the Romanian town of Sinaia. However, the current sculptures and spatial installations usually only vaguely reference their source, which is in fact almost invisible due to prolific copying. The connection between exhibition site and their own work is a programmatic principle for Peles Empire, one that is continually put into practice. Thus, through interaction among two- and three-dimensionality, citation, transfer, and new connotation, a new perspective on past and present opens up with each new exposition. The Künstlerhaus in Graz finds resonance in the collective’s visual repertoire several times over: besides an intensive exploration of the current appearance of the venue, visual citations are found in the exhibition from the founding era of this magnificent structure built in 1952 under the auspices of White Modernism.