What happens when two artworks occupy the same conceptual and material terrain at the same time? Berlin recently offered a particularly telling — and faintly uncanny — case.
At NADAN Gallery, the Japanese duo KIYOMI+TETSUHIRO UOZUMI presented Gazing as the Void Begins, an exhibition featuring sound installations and sculptural arrangements built from orange municipal trash bins belonging to Berlin’s waste-management system (BSR). Fair enough. Just one week earlier, at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Klara Lidén opened an retrospective exhibition including her own works employing the exact same municipal bins — objects she has incorporated into her sculptural vocabulary since years.
Two exhibitions, same city, same hyper-specific object. What does it mean?
While Lidén technically “did it first,” the question itself reveals something about the contemporary understanding of artistic originality. The anxiety around precedence suggests that artworks operate like territorial claims. To arrive second is to risk appearing derivative; to arrive first is to secure conceptual ownership. But this logic is historically fragile.
Since the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, the notion of originality has been repeatedly destabilised. Duchamp’s gesture demonstrated that the artwork’s significance lies less in inventing an object than in repositioning it. The readymade therefore redistributed authorship from production to framing. Under these conditions, the appearance of similar objects in different works should not necessarily provoke accusations of theft. Repetition is not only inevitable in contemporary art — it is foundational to it. Yet the situation becomes somewhat complicated when the works appear almost simultaneously.
In these moments, coincidence and influence become indistinguishable. The possibility that Uozumi simply did not know Lidén’s earlier trash-bin works cannot be dismissed. Parallel invention is a common phenomenon in art history, from early modern abstraction to conceptual practices of the 1960s. Artists working within similar discursive conditions often arrive at comparable solutions independently. Nevertheless, the possibility of ignorance raises its own questions.
Contemporary artistic practice presupposes a degree of historical awareness. The expectation that artists conduct research — mapping precedents, tracing conceptual genealogies, situating their work within an existing field — is no longer optional. It is part of the labour of art-making itself. One might call this the epistemic dimension of artistic production.
To produce a work today is not only to fabricate an object or stage an experience; it is also to navigate a dense archive of prior gestures. Artistic practice therefore extends into the terrain of research: the library, the exhibition history, the informal networks through which knowledge circulates. If two works appear uncannily similar, the question is not simply whether one copied the other. It is also whether the conceptual field in which they operate has been sufficiently examined.
Seen from this perspective, the trash-bin episode becomes less a scandal than a diagnostic event. It exposes the uneasy status of originality within contemporary art — a concept that remains institutionally central even though it has been theoretically dismantled for decades. Here Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the artwork’s aura remains instructive. Benjamin argued that the authority of the original object depends on its singular presence in time and space. Yet modern technologies of reproduction erode this uniqueness, allowing images and objects to circulate endlessly.
What Benjamin identified as a historical transformation has since become the default condition of contemporary culture. And yet the art world continues to defend originality with remarkable intensity. In psychoanalytic terms, this attachment begins to resemble what Sigmund Freud described as fetishism: the attribution of excessive symbolic value to a particular object in order to stabilise an underlying anxiety. Originality becomes the fetish object of contemporary art—a concept invested with disproportionate significance precisely because its stability is constantly threatened.
The fear that “someone else has already done it” is therefore not merely professional paranoia. It is a structural feature of a field organised around symbolic precedence. The irony, of course, is that the objects at the centre of this particular dispute could hardly be less unique. Municipal trash bins are among the most standardised artefacts of urban infrastructure. They exist precisely to be interchangeable.
When these objects enter the gallery, however, their status changes dramatically. As Brian O’Doherty famously argued in his analysis of the modern exhibition space, the gallery isolates objects from the contingencies of everyday life in order to produce the illusion of aesthetic autonomy. Within this environment, even the most banal artefact can acquire the aura of singularity.
The trash bin thus undergoes a curious transformation. In the street, it is anonymous infrastructure; in the gallery, it becomes a site of authorship. Lidén’s earlier works mobilised the object within a sculptural language that foregrounds urban detritus and spatial disruption. Uozumi’s installations, by contrast, activate the bins through sound and mechanical movement, transforming them into resonant instruments that register the rhythms of the city.
Materially similar objects therefore generate distinct aesthetic propositions. Yet the coincidence of their appearance inevitably activates the art world’s reflexive obsession with precedence. Who arrived first? Whose gesture counts as original? Who occupies the conceptual territory?
That NADAN declined to comment on the overlap only heightens this uncertainty. Silence in such situations becomes part of the interpretive field, allowing speculation to circulate unchecked. Ultimately, the episode reveals less about the intentions of the artists than about the mechanisms through which contemporary art evaluates similarity. The doppelgänger does not simply expose potential imitation; it exposes the fragile infrastructure of originality itself.
Trash bins, indifferent to these debates, continue to circulate through the city in endless repetition. Inside the gallery, however, they suddenly become singular. And it is this transformation—from anonymous object to contested artwork—that reveals how powerfully the art world remains attached to the fantasy that ideas, like property, can be owned.
