Institution Gaps

2025-ongoing

For her ongoing project, Institution Gaps, Kyla Liang designs site-specific miniature entrances for the narrow gaps beside art institutions and installs them as unlicensed architectural additions. These parasitic structures draw from the architecture, visibility, and authority of their institutional hosts. They imitate back entrances, ticket machines, cellar doors, and other architectural forms of access. They offer symbolic alternative entrances and imagined temporary shelters at the institution’s edge.

Dressed as a maintenance worker in a hard hat and work vest, Liang carries a toolbox and installs these anonymous interventions late at night. By cleaning the gap and carefully placing each structure, she performs a small act of care toward spaces usually treated as leftover. The disguise allows her to perform a temporary form of belonging while testing the institution’s control over its edges.

Institution Gaps examines the institutional edge as both a spatial and temporal boundary. The institution determines not only where the work may exist, but how long it is allowed to remain. By placing miniature entrances within these gaps and allowing their eventual removal to become part of the work, Liang uses the institutional edge to reveal how scale, access, visibility, authority, and duration are structured through the institution’s control of its boundary.