“False Reading” Exhibition by Lauraine Mak

“False Reading”takes its title from the idea of a “good luck” bird whose shape emerged through a molybdomancy ritual; the practice of divining meaning from molten tin poured into water. This bird can be simultaneously read as a crane and as a vulture which are competing omens, one of prosperity and one of death. The exhibition considers what it means to fixate on such readings and to oscillate between belief and doubt, to reconcile superstition with systems of logic and measurement, and to return again to uncertainty.

The project engages Kant’s notion of the mathematical sublime, in which the mind confronts a limit to comprehension. Here, the limit is not scale but interpretation: forms appear legible yet resist stable meaning, producing a tension between what can be perceived and what can be understood. The divine bird becomes a site of this breakdown.

The exhibition stages itself as a rooftop populated by various charms and deterrents, unfolding through a series of sculptural works that function to both attract and drive away these omens. Eight wheel-like structures composed of sixteen spokes incorporate bubble levels and fragments of measuring tape, utilizing instruments of orientation and quantification. Their deliberate misalignment and fragmentation point to the insufficiency of these tools, suggesting that measurement cannot fully stabilize our relation to the world. Adjacent to these works, ready-made commercial bird deterrents introduce a parallel logic of control, one grounded in the governance of physical space against natural phenomena. Across the exhibition, spinning mechanisms recur. The works are compelled to move in response to the same forces that guide birds in flight: wind. 

A video projection shows a reflective hawk kite tethered and turning continuously, revealing a synthetic apparatus whose purpose is to deter the very object whose image it takes form of. Finally, a projection of the Pacific Ocean’s horizon functions as a natural analogue to a bubble level. The exhibition also sees Post-Mak reference a fascination with the rooftop structures she had seen in Cairo and Giza on her first visit in 2024, many of which exist as informal dwellings and pigeon houses. These sites resonate deeply with birds and urban airspaces, in turn framing them as points of intersection between urban and wildlife environments.

Mak’s conceptual inquiry sustains the coexistence of superstition and logic. The phenomenological processes that overlap and contradict one another return to a point where neither is reliable, leaving us where we began in the interpretive cycle.

Join us for the opening night on Wednesday, 6th of May, 2026, at 7 pm.

Running until Thursday, 21st of May, daily, ex. Fridays and Saturdays, from 4 to 9 PM

Medrar, 10 Gamal Eldin Abo ElMahsen, 8th floor, Garden City, Cairo.