Sofía Sinibaldi begins with the city at walking speed. On daily routes through New York, she photographs and scans what most people pass without keeping: branches, metal grilles, shop-window objects, reflective surfaces, and visual fragments that have not yet announced themselves as subjects.
For The Modern Window: Sofía Sinibaldi, opening November 6 at The Museum of Modern Art, the artist turns from the sidewalk to the remains of a shared meal. Her new installation, The Long Conversation, magnifies the wine stain and the orange peel until they become a language of gathering, memory, and connection.
A scanner used like a drawing instrument
Sinibaldi works with a digital camera and a handheld flatbed scanner, sometimes applying the scanner directly to surfaces and objects. The process produces fragments rather than conventional views. She prints those fragments on tissue paper, then manipulates the fragile material by hand as it tears, folds, and changes.
The tension between capture and touch is central to the work. The camera and scanner collect data, but the final image is not an untouched digital record. Repetition, reversal, layering, and material breakdown turn documentation into a painterly construction. A tool associated with office reproduction becomes a way to draw through contact.
MoMA describes the commission as monumental in scale. The enlargement does not make the tabletop grand in a traditional sense; it makes ordinary evidence newly legible. A peel is no longer refuse. A stain becomes the trace of time spent together. The installation asks how intimacy can persist after the people have left the table.
Looking backward to move the image forward
The work draws on early twentieth-century photographers in MoMA’s collection, including Josef Sudek and Man Ray. Both used light, shadow, and unfamiliar framing to unsettle everyday things. Sinibaldi extends that question through contemporary capture devices and a deliberately unstable paper support.
For artists, her method is a reminder that technical novelty does not depend on the newest machine. It can come from changing the relationship between tool and subject. The handheld scanner is used against expectation; the digital fragment is made vulnerable by tissue; the ordinary scene is reorganized through scale.
The commission also offers a different picture of urban practice. New York is not treated as a skyline or spectacle. It is encountered through repetition and attention, then carried indoors to a table where the city’s public textures meet the private residue of hospitality.
Organized by MoMA PS1 curator Kari Rittenbach and presented as a collaboration between MoMA and MoMA PS1, The Long Conversation will remain on view through October 2027. Its title suggests that an image need not end when the meal does. It can continue through the objects, marks, and gestures that remain.