Butter is no part of Gingerbread
Selina Hammer and Hwachi Kim
06–14 June 2026
MARS
Ginnheimer Landstr. 35
Frankfurt
Photos © Lorenz Kerkhoff
Pressing, cutting, glazing. The kitchen becomes a studio; the oven acts as a collaborator, reshaping the intentions pressed into the dough. A recipe shaped over time passes from a local bakery into our hands. More hands gather around the dough. Flour, honey, eggs, and sugar move between sticky, powdery, liquid, and solid states. The dough rises, collapses, and changes form, continuously adjusting itself and the ideas formed around it. Each fragment remembers touch; each crack remembers heat. Some pieces bend, some crack, some come out darker than others.
Once baked, the surfaces are stamped — with some stamps made by us, some brought from Korea, and others found and bought along the way. Words, patterns, and images settle onto the hardened surfaces, bringing references from different places together on the same brittle material. Gingerbread carries its histories with it. In German-speaking countries, its appearance is difficult to separate from a particular time of year: supermarket shelves, childhood memories, domestic rituals, decoration, and the anticipation of something yet to come. Revisiting this material from different contexts, we approach it as a form of translation — mixed with an optimistic melancholia. Familiar images remain, but are allowed to drift elsewhere.
Gingerbread and Christmas lights enter the space already carrying their own baggage. Gingerbread structures scaled up to human presence stand among smaller ones; small windows and hideouts reveal drawings and fragments. Christmas lights fall from the tops of the sculptures and stretch loosely from the tip of one structure to another, forming something that seems at once familiar and difficult to place. Neither entirely decoration nor entirely illumination, they hover above structures that seem to be neither houses nor food.
Opening the exhibition door, the smell greets you first: spices, baked flour, the sweetness of sugar. Directly in front of the entrance stands a gingerbread structure close to human scale. The smell remains familiar, while the scale and shape of its source have shifted. Dripping icing, scattered sugar crumbs, and residues left from baking gather around the structures. Sweetness accumulates. Sticky, dry, brittle, burnt at the edges. Between the larger forms appear small windows, fragments, and places to hide. Above them, the Christmas lights continue. Festive, but out of place; familiar, but somehow slightly strange. Gingerbread becomes a site where time softens and takes shape again, where preservation and disappearance coexist within the same scent. It dries, cracks, absorbs moisture, and changes its smell. Heat shapes the forms; time continues them. Even small failures preserve moments of hesitation and impatience.
Our collaborative work mixes new and older pieces, placing them in dialogue with one another. Reusing and shifting contexts — exploring what these objects and paintings carry when encountered anew. Drawings, baked surfaces, fragments, and existing works gather without having to resolve into a single narrative. We begin with what can be held in the hand. Through the softness of dough, vulnerability; through its hardening, endurance. Warmth, humor, and decay remain close to one another. Somewhere between domesticity and architecture, appetite and structure, celebration and its aftermath, a fantasy unfolds.
Gingerbread in late summer — how cruel to be reminded already that the year will soon be over; time could have been kinder. How sweet, at the same time, to be invited by the optimistic promise of a better year to come. There is something about seeing gingerbread appear on supermarket shelves that holds depression and euphoria at once. Removed from its expected use, yet never entirely detached from its cultural context, its spices and scent hold something strangely sensual: spicy cinnamon, dripping honey, sticky sugar, the density of baked dough. Christmas lights flicker between the structures. Something festive persists, while the celebration itself never fully arrives. Sweetness intertwines with loss; anticipation is already turning into memory.