What lies within a visible form — and can the core ever be separated from the system that allows it to exist?

During Berlin Art Week, TOVA Gallery, in collaboration with BBA Gallery, presents The Game of Nuts, a group exhibition developed from TOVA NUTS™ and the research-based practice of TOVA Artist. At the centre of the project is TOVA’s concept of the nut: core and shell existing as a single structure, where inner content becomes perceptible through the form in which it appears. This principle of non-separation runs throughout TOVA’s practice, connecting specialist knowledge with artistic form and analytical systems with lived experience.

For TOVA, every nut begins with specific knowledge. Her long-term research into financial markets, including market microstructure and financial modelling, becomes part of the artistic process itself. In TOVA NUTS™, research takes spatial form: an internal painting exists within a sculptural shell as one object. The exhibition presents Spiritual Vessel from the Tova Heart collection and Flare from Bloom Time. The Derivatives cycle develops the same logic through works on paper, drawing on systems in which value and meaning emerge through dependency. Individual signs acquire significance through their position and relation to the wider structure, while works such as Observer, Interpretation and Nonstandard Error explore how knowledge changes through observation, models and the possibility of error.

The Game of Nuts extends this idea across the practices of the other artists. In Yvonne von Langsdorff’s Fragile Realism, the nut emerges as a somatic and emotional state that shapes visible reality. For Nano Nasty, it develops through tactile abstraction, where dense surfaces and physical material give inner states a tangible form. In the analogue photography of Adam Ripley, the nut is found in the internal organisation of the natural environment, where water, stone and time exist within a continuous system. Works by Vladimir Kordiukov from the TOVA Gallery collection introduce a material and cultural nut, built through assemblage and the relationships between found objects, textile elements and cultural signs.

The exhibition begins with TOVA’s artistic method and opens it into a wider field of distinct practices. Knowledge, somatic experience, tactile matter, natural systems and cultural memory become different forms of nut. Their meanings remain in play, continuing to develop through the relationships between the works and through the viewer’s encounter with them.

The Game of Nuts presents TOVA Artist, Yvonne von Langsdorff, Nano Nasty and Adam Ripley, alongside works by Vladimir Kordiukov from the TOVA Gallery collection, continuing the gallery’s programme in core-based art, modern and contemporary photography.