Vanishing Meter begins with the historical transformations of its exhibition space: Petrine’s Düsseldorf is located within the former office of a pipe-fittings and flanges factory. Founded in 1893, the factory was in operation for over 100 years before its closure in 1995 due to industrial decline in Germany; it was subsequently redeveloped for commercial activity. Today the former-factory hosts supermarkets, drug stores, clothing stores, doctor’s offices, restaurants, and more—a spatial transition from the industrial to the consumer, production to consumption. Tracing this transformation as allegorical to what the economist Ernest Mandel calls the “general universal industrialization” of life under late capitalism, Vanishing Meter aims to untangle the figure of metrological standardization from its popular image as a neutral and passive force.

Contemporary standardization began with the Metric system, an invention of the French Revolutionary government. This was not an invention based solely on rationality or economic efficiency. The metric system aimed to flatten local measurements left-over from a lapsed economic system and produce the abstractly equalized, national space of France, and in turn the French citizen. Thus, measurement and its standardization, at its origin, already eludes its common conception as a neutral and purely rational project.

To measure is to abstract, narrow, reduce, and capture, yet it is also to produce new forms of relational space, shared perceptual habits, and new aesthetic possibilities. The works gathered in Vanishing Meter do not simply depict reified industrial relations today, they register their psychic, social, and political consequences, revealing how standardization infiltrates the texture of thought and vanishes into the objects that populate our lives and fantasies.

The exhibition was curated by Matthew Lawson Garrett, and features the work of Anna-Sophie Berger, Michael Caudo, Ishu Han, Mimmo Haraditiohadi, and Sara MacKillop.