Ehrlich Steinberg is pleased to present Passagenwerken, a new series of engineered wood panel reliefs, by Los Angeles-based artist Coleman Collins for the 30th edition of Liste. Drawing from Walter Benjamin’s influential, unfinished Arcades Project (1927 - 1940), the series reimagines the architectural forms of the French arcade, with inset color film stills taken from Claire Denis’ 2009 White Material.

Arcades, rows of arched portals used in ancient structures like Rome’s Colosseum, were, more recently, employed by nineteenth-century European cities as shopping havens in tandem with the rise of consumer goods. Considering the arcade as a symbolic and literal passageway, Collins explores the tension between the idealistic promises of Western modernity and the resource extraction and dispossession of non-Western territories that sustain it.

Each work depicts an architectural space, mechanically carved from a single piece of engineered wood (more commonly used in home construction) drawing a parallel between its utilitarian role in building physical structures and its repurposing here as a surface for visualizing cultural and material legacies. The works’ titles—quotes from Arcades Project, shifting between French and German—map the various contradictions of the modern European era: the temporal and spatial disorientation of the market arcade and city life, the allure of consumer culture and the violence that underpins it, and the ephemeral figure of the flâneur adrift within the spatial and social frameworks that shape him.

While Collins’ reliefs feature the rendering of slick surfaces in monochromatic grey, the inlaid colored film stills act as perceptual interruptions. Here, the images appear almost structural, constituting large swaths of the works’ surface, inserted to follow the movement and perspective of the panels’ carved forms.

The repeated still, a six-second clip within Denis’ White Material, depicts a close-up of a rebel soldier within a French-speaking African country in the midst of civil war. Upon discovering a gold cigarette lighter left behind at an old coffee plantation, the soldier dismissively describes the object as “just white material” and plays with it absent-mindedly. Fascinated by the short scene, Collins understands this moment as an encapsulation of a larger cycle of extraction, consumption, abandonment, and return, embodied by the physical form of the arcade.

Where Benjamin addressed the simultaneously alienating and intoxicating phantasmagorias of commoditization and consumerism for the Western subject, Collins extends this inquiry into the afterlives of colonial expansion and their entwinement within modernity’s most omnipresent aesthetic forms.