A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Architecture as Metaphor

Kafka’s aphorism, “A cage went in search of a bird,” offers a haunting reversal—an image of architecture in pursuit of its own inhabitant. In this inversion, structure precedes life; form searches for meaning. The phrase becomes a lens through which to consider architecture not merely as shelter or construction, but as a living metaphor for desire, absence, and transformation.

This exhibition explores architecture as both object and idea—a site where memory, material, and imagination intersect. Here, the architectural language is dismantled and reassembled in fragments: walls, thresholds, stairways, grids, voids. Each fragment becomes an autonomous form, detached from its utilitarian role yet charged with emotional and psychological resonance.

Through sculpture, installation, and mixed-media works, the artists investigate how the built environment mirrors human experience—its containment, its openness, its fragile equilibrium between order and chaos. The works move between solidity and dissolution, between the physical and the poetic, reflecting how space itself can embody both confinement and freedom.

In A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, architecture becomes a seeker—a body in search of breath, a form in search of presence. The exhibition asks: what happens when structure outlives its purpose, when fragments become the only traces of what once held life? By situating architecture within this metaphorical and emotional terrain, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider not just how we build, but how we inhabit—how the spaces we create continue to seek us, long after we’ve left them behind.