ILY2 is excited to announce an exhibition of recent work by Mira Dayal and Tatiana Kronberg, on view at our New York location (35 Saint James Place, New York, NY 10038) from January 23 - March 7, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Friday, January 23rd, from 6-8pm.
Dayal and Kronberg explore the limits and possibilities of material as language. With shared interests in modes and technologies of communication, embodied knowledge, and the relationships between form and function, both artists use their chosen materials - light and steel - to index choreographies of labor over time, while creating larger formal vocabularies. The works in the show maintain a carefully calibrated tension between legibility and obfuscation, control and material anomaly, flux and stasis, line and space, narrative and abstraction.
In her newest body of work, Dayal heats and bends steel to reimagine configurations from multiple traditions of string games, such as cat’s cradle, considered one of humanity’s oldest games. Exaggerated in scale while maintaining cues for absent fingers, these “figures” draw awareness to the bodies of both viewer and maker. Each sculpture is constructed without joints or welds, relying instead on the laborious twisting and tying of long rods of metal. The resulting forms appear both familiar and foreign, emphasizing the spatial and contextual contingencies of object-legibility. Even when their titles suggest a representational anchor or allude to an accompanying story, Dayal’s reinterpretations often suspend the figures mid-transformation, inviting projections of what they might be or become.
Kronberg’s photograms address similar themes of suspension, mutability, and transience, generating abstract images without a camera by exposing photosensitive paper to light. With an emphasis on process and physicality, she builds sculptural compositions using her own body as both prop and point of orientation, along with handheld lights, lasers, and constructed objects of varying transparency and reflectivity. Working in darkness, Kronberg relies on touch, memory, and proprioception - the body’s awareness of itself in space - to guide her actions. This performative engagement with material and environment activates muted brain pathways in a vision-centric world, while registering intuition and subconscious impulse over rigid technical control.
On the whole, the exhibition embraces tension - both within each artwork and between the alternating similarities and differences in the two artists’ practices. With different material strategies, Dayal and Kronberg have arrived at resonant approaches to conveying haptic resonance, structuring process and labor versus final image or object, and halting systems in motion. The works’ disparate connotations engender a fruitful friction that further emphasizes how form and material inform the construction of meaning.
* * * * Mira Dayal (b. 1995) lives and works in New York. Her work has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Mehrab Bookshop, Kochi, India; Fuller Rosen Gallery, Philadelphia; Princeton University, NJ; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY; Kunstverein Dresden, Germany, Gymnasium, NY; Lubov, NY; NARS Foundation, NY; and Abrons Art Center, NY. Group exhibitions include: The Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Van Abbehuis, Eindhoven, Netherlands; Feral File; Barnard College, NY; Miriam, NY; lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA; Parent Company, NY; Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Artspace New Haven, CT; OCHI, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, NY; and NURTUREart, NY, among others. Her work has been covered in Afterimage, the Art Newspaper, BOMB Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, the Chicago Reader, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and other publications. She has participated in residencies at Fountainhead, the Steel Yard, Ox-Bow, Art in General, and A.I.R. Gallery. Dayal is Senior Editor at Triple Canopy and has previously been an editor at Art in America and Artforum. She is on faculty at Barnard College and the School of Visual Arts.
Tatiana Kronberg (b. 1976) was born in Sevastopol, Crimea and currently lives and works between Red Hook, New York and New York City. The artist employs photograms, performance, and sculpture in an exploration of images as active events.Her work has been exhibited throughout the US in solo shows at 321 Gallery, New York; Adds Donna, Chicago; Essex Flowers, New York; and Joan, Los Angeles. Her work has also been exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Paris; International Center of Photography, New York; Eskenazi Museum of Art, Bloomington; ILY2, Portland; The Artists Alliance, New York; Motel, Brooklyn; Regina Rex, New York, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; Rochester Contemporary Arts Centre, NY and Artists Space, New York. In 2019, she transformed one of her photograms into a 70-foot-long permanent public art installation commissioned by Public Art for Public Schools for The Academy for Excellence Through the Arts. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Topical Cream, and ArtNews among other publications. She holds a BA from New York University and an MFA from Bard-ICP in Advanced Photographic Studies.
