accessible in a nuanced way. The piece evokes the precarity of the border, the fragility of the human lives risked to cross, and the power both wielded and implied by man-made demarcations. Facilitating touch in a touchless world, the piece reminds audiences of the invisible yet concrete ways we have been separated due to the often-arbitrary delineations of nation-states. At some point during a visit to El-Sherbini’s exhibition, audiences are bound to encounter the piece OCCUPIED/ FREED (2020), though they may not know it. This subtle intervention re-configures the gallery toilet locks to indicate “occupied” when in use and “freed” when available, provoking questions of ownership and geopolitics. The piece identifies occupation of land as a form of control, and points to how a border is implemented to regulate the movement of people. Other Forms of Regulation and Control (2020) serves as the centerpiece and namesake of the exhibition. The work spans the gallery’s main space and features three hygrothermographs. Unseen by most visitors, hygrothermographs are small machines used in all major galleries and museums to observe the environment of the space on a graph and control it to protect the artworks. These machines are often out of sight, on the periphery of the space, but here they are the artwork.
Humidity and temperature are measured by inserting a piece of human hair into the machine. These particular machines use phenotypically Caucasian hair as the baseline for monitoring the space. El-Sherbini displays the three hygrothermographs on pedestals. The charcoal grey and clear plastic machines, complete with delicate green graph paper, appear scientific in nature. Set in the middle of a quiet space save for a methodical ticking noise, the sole presence of three machines is unsettling and immediately elicits the question of what they are monitoring. In each machine the hair used has been changed to one of the three ethno-hair profiles based on race: "Asian," "Caucasian," and "African" (also classified as “Afro” in some studies). By supplying the machines with these three “scientific” classifications of ethnicity, El-Sherbini exposes racialized mechanisms in the everyday and invites the audience to monitor what happens to a space when whiteness is not the default. Graphs documenting the environmental changes recorded by each machine will be cumulatively displayed, weekto-week. Moving the machines out of the shadows and into the spotlight signals the invisible forms of regulation and control within society at large. This alluring minimalism is a simple yet powerful intervention, changing the element by which we measure the world around 27