Beverly Buchanan in Berlin: "Beverly Buchanan. Weathering" @ Haus am Waldsee

text by Arlo Kremen


Standing a block away from the last stop of the U3 at Krumme Lanke, Haus am Waldsee, a beautiful residence turned art museum, sits by the Zehlendorf quarter’s local lake, or Waldsee. Haus am Waldsee is the only property on the lake where all visitors are free to access the water, a facet of the institution deeply in line with the ethos of the late Beverly Buchanan’s work. For her “shack” works, Buchanan regularly trespassed onto the grounds of these structures of Southern American vernacular architecture for photos and inspiration, coming face to face with many upset, disgruntled, and irritated homeowners, but also new friends. In this regular practice, she met Ms. Mary Lou Fulcron, a woman who had built her house and lived alone. In an excerpt of the artist’s writing, Buchanan shares how she helped carry logs for Ms. Fulcron, and her challenge of ingratiating herself with an isolated black woman in Georgia, a challenge that had become a regular exercise for the artist. From her brief diary entry pinned up in the show, Ms. Fulcron meant a lot to Buchanan. A woman of endurance, who, when hospitalized, escaped back to her house on foot, ten miles away, scared something would happen to her home.

These are the stories Buchanan saw in every shack she came across, with many of these structures being somewhat-restyled slave cabins. She saw power, endurance, and survival in each and every one. When speaking to curators, Beatrice Hilke and Pia-Marie Remmers told another story of Buchanan entering a home at night without a roof. All she wrote about was how clear the stars were. She never came to a home with judgment, critique, or patronizing worry; she came to these homes as if they were art objects—monuments to those who live and have lived in them.

Beverly Buchanan
Three Families (A Memorial Piece with Scars) [with legend], 1989
Print on paper
10 x 23 cm
Courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery

Ima-Abasi Okon made two accompanying works to the show. The first involved lockboxes outside the premises that take visitors to the lake and onto the private property around the museum. In these lockboxes are lube and organic materials. Lube is a substance to bring an object into a space where it does not belong. With its sexual connotations, the interaction between foreign object and intruded upon space can be procreative and pleasurable, referring to Buchanan’s trespassings and their paramount role in her practice. The other works Okon made were wall paintings covering every inch of wall with pollen. Titled Sex (2025), the walls are streaked yellow, bringing the materiality and smell of the outside inside. Here, Okon submits the walls to environmental degradation, a frequent technique of her more labor-intensive sculptural works. With a title like Sex, Okon also propounds this feature of her work as similarly pleasurable and procreative. 

A common misconception of Buchanan’s oeuvre is that she is an outsider artist. However, the artist had been exhibited at A.I.R. gallery alongside contemporary and friend Ana Mendieta and started out as an abstract expressionist under the tutelage of Norman Lewis. Buchanan was trained as an insider. Her works are of the trends of her time, land art, conceptual art, and post-minimalism, but her works have a D.I.Y. inflection to them. Her shacks, alongside her other wooden construction pieces, are undeniably in conversation with the folk art of the South. According to Buchanan, she always “made things,” never really understanding her creations as art objects until later. She began her professional life in medicine, studying parasitology at Columbia University, which brought her to New York, where she eventually connected with the Art Students’ League. 

Beverly Buchanan,
Lamar County, GA, 2003
Oil pastel on paper
56 x 76 cm
courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery

The artist suffered from several chronic illnesses, having stacks of medical bills to pay at any given time. To pay these bills, Buchanan sold many of her works for the exact prices of different bills, spreading her work across a plethora of private owners in and outside of Macon and Athens, Georgia. Hilke and Remmers, doing research in the state to prepare for this show, ventured into many homes only to find different Buchanan works on unassuming walls and tables. All of her flower works exhibited in the show came from these homes. The flowers were put together by Okon, offering a contrasting side to the artist, who, in adjoining rooms, has her still sculptural works. One such room includes her monumental frustula, cement sculptures whose molds she made from bricks and found materials like milk cartons. The frustula works, while many being of different cement mixtures, all have a timeless, enduring quality—shaped by time. The flowers, on the other hand, are electric. Quick, loose-colored scrawlings across paper build up a shape that could be called anything but still lives. Her shack pastels have an identical effect. Often exhibited with the shack sculptures, the curators made the decision to show the pastels on the second floor, overlooking the sculpture garden. By separating pastels from sculptures, both mediums could stand autonomously, the curators prevent the unfortunate hierarchy that tends to favor the shack sculptures as the more prominent representations.

Beverly Buchanan
Untitled, 1978—1980
Print on glossy paper
20 x 25 cm
Courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery


Beverly Buchanan. Weathering took a very gentle, nuanced approach to the wide-ranging work of Beverly Buchanan, permitting her work to breathe and soak up the space as individual works and as series, while simultaneously forwarding the artist’s massive archive. Buchanan had a rigorous documentation process—photos, writings, poems, and drawings—spread by the stairwell on the second floor, situating her ephemera as a prime feature of her practice. Her archiving instinct became of sizable importance to her Marsh Ruins (1981). For this land piece on the coast of Georgia, Buchanan built a memorial to the enslaved people who, once landed on American soil, raced to the water and drowned as an act of return to their homes. Funded by the Guggenheim grant, Buchanan worked with a few other laborers to make tabby stones that blend into the swamp landscape, becoming nearly unrecognizable as human-made objects. Shown as a slideshow, the recording covers the correspondence between the artist and the Guggenheim, the work proceeds through the day-by-day photographic coverage with supplementary captions taken by the artist to prove the project was completed. Although not necessarily Marsh Ruins, the work shown is an artwork in its own right, turning bureaucratic processes into a creative act. Beverly Buchanan. Weathering showcases a nuanced approach to Buchanan’s work, all while giving visitors a glimpse into her mind to reveal a singular person who stretched her art into every corner of her life.


Beverly Buchanan. Weathering is on view through February 1st @ Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.

Surrealism's Provenance: "Networks of Surrealism" @ Neue Nationalgalerie

André Masson
Massaker “Massacre,” 1931
Oil on canvas
120 x 160 cm
Courtesy of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch

text by Arlo Kremen


Tucked behind the cafe and gift shop of the Neue Nationalgalerie sits a modest L-shaped gallery space. Enough room to fit a medium-sized show, one would not expect it to be used to host the Surrealists’ international cohort, who could very well fill the entire museum with their verbose oeuvre. As such, Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism has a specific aim, a narrowing agent succinct enough as to make the gallery space feel appropriately expansive to cover the community of artists with twenty-six works. The show homes in on provenance, tracking each displayed painting sourced from the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection.

In 2023, around 100 artworks from the Pietzsch Collection received careful attention from researchers seeking to uncover each work’s origin and the succession of owners. The goal was to ascertain whether Nazi persecution played a factor in the shifting of ownership. During the Nazi occupation in France, the Surrealists and their interlocutors had to make a decision: flee into exile, remain as a part of the resistance, or go into hiding. This collection began in the 1970s and ended in the 2000s, acquiring works from galleries, dealers, and auction houses globally. The couple’s 2010 donation to the State of Berlin made this show and its research possible.

 
 

The show maps the provenance timeline of each displayed work, bringing historical narratives into the foreground. Biographical exhibitions can be a challenge. In a slightly different educational gesture than the anti-intellectualism plaguing museum plaques, where artists’ personal details take priority over the work itself, the work of art here still takes a secondary position to information. Art represents a story and thus loses its autonomy. The work is no longer important because it is art; the work is important for the history it represents. This approach attempts to give the gallery-goer a painless point of entry into art and meaning-making at large, but it never fails to come across as patronizing and distrustful of the audience’s intellect, assigning identity and history as prime tools for interpretation rather than the age-old skill of looking.

Many works benefited from the exhibition’s pursuit of historical narrative, unveiling colorful details of the Circle’s interpersonal affairs. The first painting of the show, Miró’s “The Arrow Piercing Smoke,” had originally been owned by the man it was dedicated to, Serge Lifar. The Ukrainian-French dancer and choreographer was a member of the notorious “Ballets Russes” and had worked closely with Max Ernst in costume and stage design. Appointed a year before and holding on to his directorship of the Ballet wing of the Paris Opera during Nazi Occupation, he was removed briefly for Nazi collaboration once the German occupying force retreated from France. “The Arrow Piercing Smoke” was held by Lifar for about thirty-six years before the painting’s acquisition by Paul Pétridès, where, at some point in the mid-1960s, it made the same leap across the Atlantic that Miró made to New York City nearly twenty years prior, eventually settling into the home of Alexander and Louisa Calder. While not necessarily about the art, the information supplementing the work poses it more as an object used to better understand the inner workings, members, associates, and the political landscape of the Surrealist diaspora.

Joan Miró
The Arrow Piercing Smoke, 1926
Oil on canvas
40 x 56 cm
Courtesy of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch

The show has quite a few Ernst paintings given its relatively small size. And this is by no means a critique—he was not only one of the most central figures of the movement but also was interned at Les Milles, the concentration camp that would inspire his escape to the US with Peggy Guggenheim during his second arrest. His life is tinged with the effects of Nazi occupation, the driving narratological force of the show, but this fact led to a reliance on indirect ties to Nazism on the part of his displayed work. Kurt Siegelmann had many works alongside Ernst at the Exposition internationale du Surréalisme. He also held on to Ernst’s Garden Airplane Trap. Due to Siegelmann’s Judaism, he brought the painting with him to the US to avoid Nazi persecution. Another exhibited Ernst painting belonged to a different Jewish artist, Tristan Tzara, to whom Ernst gifted his painting Two Nude Girls, which remained in Tzara’s possession until his death in 1963, following his move to Marseille and his involvement in the French Resistance. Another displayed Ernst painting, Gala, Max and Paul, is a far cry from Garden Airplane Trap and Two Nude Girls, whose provenance is inseparable from Nazi persecution. Gala, Max, and Paul tells the story of Ernst’s ménage à trois with Paul and Gala Éluard. Despite being wonderfully scandalous biographical details, its inclusion in this show feels askew. A dramatic tone shift towards the playful fits poorly among so many artistic artifacts whose histories speak to evading Nazi destruction. Such an inclusion possibly hints, if read ungenerously, as wall filler or, more likely, an incomplete concept. 

To exhibit a show where wall texts are more important than the paintings themselves is undoubtedly bizarre, a strangeness that permeated the gallery. Walking through the show, it felt out of place in an art museum like the Neue Nationalgalerie—possibly resonating more with a public archive or history museum than with an art institution. To study color and form felt antithetical to the curators’ mission, and yet, the format of an art show prevents combing through extensive texts, as the form necessitates the primacy of artworks. Networks of Surrealism was between an art exhibition and a historical exhibition, and in an attempt to straddle both, was left with two feet in the air.


Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism is on view through March 1 @ Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Straße 50, Berlin

A Disappearing Act: "Global Fascisms" @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt

View of ‘Global Fascisms.’ Image by Matthias Völzke


text by Arlo Kremen


At Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Global Fascisms is a mudslide. A terrific force leaking from a small alcove on the main floor downstairs, littering its debris across two gallery spaces and the hall that adjoins them. Quite literally too expansive to cleanly contain, artworks fill any available nook and cranny with just enough room and privacy to distinguish one series or individual work from another. With all wall text relegated to an optional booklet, the exhibition leans into this eclecticism—nameless, authorless, materialless works sharing spaces with no beginning or end, as though they are merely artifacts of the fascistic social conditions to which each work refers.

In this regard, Mithu Sen’s piece Unlynching: You never one piece (2017–) acts as a microcosm of the show’s sense of anonymity. Sen displays a variety of objects on a white wall behind glass with years penciled in next to broken mirror shards, bronze tools, and other ephemera. The piece refers to the violent uproars that have continued each year since the British partition of India in 1947, instilling ethnonationalism into the borders of an ethnically diverse people to enforce concepts of a pure national ethnicity. Sen’s objects were found in sites of ethnic conflicts, each speaking to the ever-present ripples of violent terror British colonialism left in its wake.

Mithu Sen
Unlynching: You never one piece, 2017—
Found objects and pencil
Courtesy of the artist

It is crucial to mention, if not already assumed, that the show’s definition of fascism is quite loose and does not fix the ideology to governmental institutions alone. HKW displays works concerning many facets of fascism and artist responses to fascism across time, from literal governmental suppression to symptoms of fascism on the internet, as well as in religious and subcultural contexts. Underscoring its breadth, the show traverses space and time with an aim: to locate the look and sound of fascism.

Walking through the show, a sense of desperation palpates. And rightly so. It feels as though there is no end to the pockets of fascism deserving of a rigorous aesthetic investigation, and yet, the show has a deadly, bleeding gash. A lapse so severe, it has impregnated every inch of the exhibition. An unfortunate predictability of a German institution, the Gazan genocide lingers as a specter. Palestine has one representative in the show from the Jerusalem-based painter Sliman Mansour, but the occupied Palestinian people are also mentioned in one work by Israeli artist Roee Rosen titled The Gaza War Tattoos (2024–2025).

Roee Rosen
Night Skies with Full Moon, 2024
Photograph
Courtesy of the artist

Rosen’s series shows a set of tattoos in reference to the ongoing “war” in Gaza. It features different tattoos recalling the deaths of Gazans and their means, such as the “mosquito” military procedure that uses human shields, and another tattoo, The Dreadful Dreidel, detailing the different titles the IDF uses to describe its military violence against Palestinians. Without question, Rosen is concerned with Israeli violence against Palestinians and is in active protest against its historic military campaign, and yet, why choose an Israeli artist over a Palestinian? The Gaza War Tattoos is one of the first works in the largest display space of the show, while Mansour’s prints are tucked away in a far less populated section, by both people and artworks. A bizarre decision for sure to prioritize an Israeli artist’s discussion of Israeli militarism over Palestinians, and yet, this has been a familiar rhetoric among not-quite-anti-zionist liberals and zionist progressives, if such a thing can even exist, who, over the voices of Palestinians and their political accomplices, use the image of anti-war protests in Israel as evidence that a morally sound Israel of the future is possible. What should be the prioritized subjectivity vanishes in an institutional disappearing act.

Sliman Mansour
Camel of Hardship, 1973
Print on paper
58 cm x 37.5 cm
Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

Mansour’s prints all predate the ongoing genocide, with the latest being from 2021, Olive Picking. Mansour’s work engages in the history of Palestinian resilience in the face of displacement, representing the lives of Palestinians, not under war or direct abuse, but in their perseverance to live their daily lives. Whether it be a woman picking olives, as in Olive Picking, or the variegated activities of a village scene overlaid in The Village Awakens (1987), he demonstrates life under occupation. This is particularly notable in Camel of Hardship (1973), where a Palestinian man schleps Jerusalem on his back, but in each careful portrait, his treatment of line and color radiates with hopeful futurity. Mansour’s work is wonderful and a worthy contour to a show concerning fascism; however, his placement in the show feels like a quota fulfillment—or a solution to institutional censorship.


Daniel Hernández-Salazar
The Traveler, 2013
Photograph on wallpaper
440 cm x 660 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Blown up to the size of the wall, the photo The Traveler (2013) by Daniel Hernández-Salazar captures a recurring motif of an angel whose wings are digitally edited, unearthed shoulder blades of unidentified victims of the Guatemalan civil war. The angel sets his hands around the shape of his open mouth with the words “SI HUBO GENOCIDIO” (IF THERE WAS GENOCIDE) in large typeface at the top of the image. In 2013, former president of Guatemala Efraín Ríos Montt was sentenced to eighty years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity. During the trial, Hernández-Salazar imprinted this motif on the back of public buses in Guatemala City as pro-Montt revisionists attempted to silence archivists and activists dedicated to his sentencing.

The placement of The Traveler is perpendicular to Mansour’s prints. The relationship between the works cannot be a coincidence—a work concerning the censorship of activists and the need to acknowledge and provide justice for the victims of genocide sits beside paintings about a people and land undergoing genocide and censorship. Assuming that HKW stipulated the absence of Palestinian art about the concurrent genocide and Israeli occupation because of Germany’s broad definition of antisemitism, this move by the curators is an ingenious maneuver—managing both to amplify Palestine through subtext, all while embedding HKW into the systems of fascism that the show aims to illustrate.

The absence of a Palestinian artist’s perspective on the genocide feels even more pointed given that the recurring medium of the show is video—the very medium by which this genocide has been broadcast on social media. The journalistic work of Korean filmmaker Yoonsuk Jung, commissioned by HKW for this show, is showcased in STEAL (2025). Created after the attempted imposition of martial law in South Korea, Yoonsuk Jung covers the eternal relationship between democracy, authoritarianism, and spectacle using footage from parliament assemblies, news outlets, and his own original shots. The artist works with the very media the Gazan genocide has been displayed to the West—and yet, Gaza appears only in the form of a tattoo.



Global Fascisms is on view through December 17th, 2025 @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10 10557, Berlin

Inhuman Failures: Kennedy + Swan's "The Red Queen Effect" @ Schering Stiftung

Kennedy + Swan
The Red Queen Effect, 2025
Photograph


text by Arlo Kremen
images by Kennedy + Swan

The Schering Stiftung is both non-profit and gallery. Its mission: to bring artists in to make work that engages the cross-section of art, technology, and education. This is particularly true for its residency program at BIFOLD, the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, titled Art of Entanglement, where selected artists become entrenched in the discourses of data management and machine learning. The residency culminates with a show at UNI_VERSUM at TU Berlin, which went up for collaborating artists Kennedy + Swan this past May. This show, THE NEVERENDING CURE, was adapted for its new display at the Schering Stiftung Project Space, now titled The Red Queen Effect.

The Red Queen Effect has two parts: Lung Portraits, lightboxes shining through chemical-treated ink on glass, and the titular work, a four-channel video installation. In the first, twelve lightboxes hang from a wall, forming a circle that climbs nearly to the top of its fixed support. Each work mimics bacterial landscapes of different lungs, albeit in a highly colorized fashion, from the perspective of a health professional’s microscope slide. Laser cuts in the glass identify potential health risks, such as cysts or melanoma, even identifying a rare subtype of breast cancer in one painting.

Kennedy + Swan
Lung Portraits, 2025
Ink on glass in a lightbox
60 x 60 cm

The artist duo merely painted these works, leaving the diagnoses to an AI model built on the study of lung tissue scans to recognize regional cancers and other cellular defects. In response to the AI model’s given diagnoses, the artists cut into the glass to write the identified issues and marked areas in the colorscape that the model had defined as problematic. This work proves rather didactic, for it poses an experiment to prove that current medical AI models have a crucial failing. They are quicker to misdiagnose than admit confusion or uncertainty, a remarkable tool for the kind of risk assessment required to treat anything from cysts in the lungs to micropapillary breast carcinoma.

The four-part video installation bears an architectural exoskeleton, holding each screen in white-tile structures, emblematic of the lab in which ALICE works. ALICE is the name of a new AI-based medical practice boasting an ambitious promise similar to that of Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos, that with suitable samples, ALICE can identify all current and potential health risks. The installation stages a pilot run, inviting volunteers to apply for the first clinical trials. Through a series of rotating videos and images, twenty-two volunteers speak. Animated through red watercolor, each represents the variegated facets of the public debate around AI’s role in medicine. Activists, technocrats, transhumanists, skeptics, rebels, a twelve-year-old girl, and many more positionalities make up the volunteer base.

Kennedy + Swan
The Red Queen Effect, 2025
Video stills in a grid

The most common reason for applying among the participants is the general distrust of doctors, reflecting the frequent sentiment of distrust among people, positing AI as a non-human, transcendent entity. However, through the visualization of the laboratory, ALICE’s code, and the AI’s visualization as a doll-like baby, the human gesture is present. There is nothing transcendent or neutral about AI—it is of the human imagination, learning from human data and human language. Kennedy + Swan refuse to dislodge AI models from the pre-existing social systems that begot them, which are the very same systems from which many of the volunteers are trying to escape.

The Red Queen Effect is presented by Schering Stiftung and is on view through December 12 @ Schering Stiftung, Unter den Linden 32-34, 10117 Berlin.

“Under Shadows” With Tamara Kvesitadze and Shunxiang Hu at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin

In Under Shadows, KORNFELD Galerie Berlin unveils not just a duo exhibition, but a reckoning with the unseen forces that shape us. Tamara Kvesitadze and Shunxiang Hu — artists born worlds apart — meet in a shared terrain of exile, resilience, and refusal. The result is haunting and quietly revolutionary.

Kvesitadze, from Georgia, has long used sculpture and painting to explore the female body as a site of memory, fragmentation, and myth. Her work carries the imprint of a nation on the brink — caught between past and present, repression and revolt. Shunxiang Hu, born in China during the One-Child Policy, offers an intimate counterpoint. As a second daughter, she was forced to relinquish her identity to survive. Her portraits, hushed and uncanny, hold this rupture close to the surface. Faces emerge like ghosts — fragile, luminous, searching.

The artists met in Berlin in late 2024, sharing not only a space but a sense of displacement. The dialogue that emerges is profound: two women from vastly different geographies tracing parallel lines through shadow — political, cultural, psychological. Their work does not offer answers. It offers atmosphere. Texture. A choreography of what’s left unsaid.

The shadow in this exhibition is not absence — it is narrative. It holds the things that were never meant to be seen: buried selves, censored memories, forgotten bodies. Kvesitadze’s sculptural forms resist coherence; they are part relic, part dream. Hu’s portraits flicker between presence and erasure, shaped by a history that deemed her existence illegal. And yet, here they are — visible, intentional, luminous.

Under Shadows is not concerned with spectacle. It doesn’t scream. It hums, low and steady. It reminds us that survival often takes the shape of quietness, that transformation can occur beneath the surface, where light barely touches.

In a moment where visibility is commodified, this exhibition argues for the power of what lies beneath — for the right to complexity, ambiguity, and opacity. Kvesitadze and Hu don’t just make art. They reclaim space. They make the shadow speak.

This is not just a show. It is a testimony — to lives lived in margins, and to the radical act of emerging from them.

Under Shadows is on view through August 23 @ KORNFELD Galerie Berlin Fasanenstr. 26 10719 Berlin

Simin Jalilian Solo Exhibiiton at 68projects by Kornfeld in Berlin

Simin Jalilian, Installation view, 68projects by KORNFELD, 2025, Photo: Andrea Katheder

At 68projects by KORNFELD, Simin Jalilian’s solo exhibition is less a show and more a visceral confrontation. Marking her debut presentation of new paintings in Berlin, the Hamburg-based Iranian artist delivers works that are both urgent and introspective — a searing combination of the biographical and the political, filtered through a painterly language that resists containment.

Jalilian’s brushstrokes do not seek perfection; they pulse with immediacy. Her canvases feel alive, caught in a moment of transformation, where figures and emotions blur into a current of expressionist intensity. The visual tension is palpable: one moment teeters on the brink of despair, another radiates fleeting transcendence.

In Please Don’t Deport, the artist places herself at the heart of a haunting tableau — a deportation scene at an airport. “That’s me,” she says, directly implicating her own fears and the shadow of displacement that haunts many immigrants. Jalilian moved from Tehran to Germany in 2016, and her work speaks directly from that liminal space between belonging and exclusion. The painting is not a plea for pity but a fierce assertion of freedom — artistic, personal, and existential.

Her painting Refugees evokes another fragile threshold: a child being passed across a divide between land and sea. The moment is suspended in light, but not safety. Danger looms, and the ambiguity of survival is never resolved. In Integration, the political becomes intimate. A casual act — opening a beer bottle — becomes a coded ritual of assimilation. The moment is undercut by blood-red fractures beneath the figures, revealing how easily identity and land can break open.

Despite their rootedness in realism, Jalilian’s paintings reject photographic precision. She conjures bodies and landscapes from memory and emotion, not from reference material. The result is work that feels fiercely personal and painterly, drawing on the legacy of German Neo-Expressionism but evolving it with a distinctly female and diasporic urgency. Her mentors may include Werner Büttner, but her voice is unmistakably her own.

In The Wow Effect, even cinema-goers are caught between rapture and blindness — a metaphor for our digital age, perhaps, but also for the dissonance between spectacle and truth. Jalilian’s paintings offer no easy conclusions. Instead, they demand we remain present — alive to instability, beauty, and the enduring human will to remain free.

On view until August 23

Simin Jalilian, Installation view, 68projects by KORNFELD, 2025, Photo: Andrea Katheder

Autre Desire Issue Dinner Celebrating Vaginal Davis at The Golden Phoenix Inside The Provocateur Hotel In Berlin

Following a signing event at Voo Store to celebrate Autre magazine’s SS25 Desire issue, a private dinner was held for Vaginal Davis at The Golden Phoenix, located inside the Provocateur Hotel in Berlin. The dinner was organized by Autre magazine and brought together a small group of invited guests, including artists, writers, curators, and members of Berlin’s queer creative community. The atmosphere was informal and intimate. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Read Our Interview of Marianna Simnett on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition 'Charades' @ SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin →

Marianna Simnett
Leda Was a Swan (production still), 2024.
Courtesy the Artist and Société, Berlin.
Photo/ Leander Ott

How we present ourselves and what we aspire to project is in an everchanging relationship with those around us. It is a story we’re telling about ourselves, to ourselves. In Marianna Simnett’s Charades, her second solo exhibition with SOCIÉTÉ, the inherent masquerade of existing in a society is examined from the ancient allegories that undergird our collective worldview to the personal histories we replay in our minds. It is a power play where nothing is ever fixed. Undermining the very foundation of Greek mythology’s Leda and the Swan, she contends that the swan was never Zeus in disguise, it was actually just a hand puppet. The subject of the story thus shifts from that of rape to masturbation when the subjects of the story exchange their masks. Persistent obfuscation is an everpresent quality within the work. In this way, she is asking you to decide whether the charade is just a playful game amongst friends, or if it is indeed an act of mockery. Read more.

Gavin Fujita Overlays the Sacred with the Profane @ Buchmann Galerie in Berlin

In his show, “Blessings and Curses of this World,” Gajin Fujita masterfully plays with the codes of American popular culture and interweaves them with pictorial elements of the diverse ethnic cultures in a globalized world. Logos of multinational companies are fused with motifs reminiscent of the woodcuts and Ukiyoe paintings of the Edo period, the tribal signs of graffiti form the background for Raphael’s putti, creating a truly contemporary cosmos of hyper-entanglement.

The extensive painterly oeuvre of the Japanese-American artist is notable for its striking synthesis of traditional Japanese motifs and techniques with those of contemporary Western graffiti art, as well as its engagement with the rich histories of both Western and East Asian painting. Fujita thus calls into question the visual codes that underpin our supposedly stable cultural identities. By employing a distinct visual vocabulary that highlights the inherent contradictions associated with globalized cultural forms, the artist introduces a dynamic motion to the works.

Gajin Fujita emphasizes the tension between tradition and the present by using gold leaf for the background, as was used for precious paintings from the Orient to the Occident. In European medieval panel painting, the gold ground iconographically separated the sacred space from the profane space. In Fujita’s work, it serves as a background for graffiti tags and bright lacquer colours.

Gajin Fujita’s oeuvre represents the expression and outcome of a contemporary, multifaceted production of culture and images. His pictorial space demonstrates the coexistence of markedly contradictory cultural signs that are characteristic of the globalized reality of our contemporary era. The consistently popular work of the Californian painter is thus in tune with the times without losing sight of history.

Blessings and Curses of This World is on view through November 9th at Buchmann Galerie at Charlottenstraße 13, 10969 Berlin.

How Hans Uhlmann Created New Forms for a New World @ Berlinische Galerie in Berlin

 
 

Hans Uhlmann's (1900–1975) abstract metal sculptures and drawings shaped the image of German post-war modernism. Berlinische Galerie’s current exhibition traces his creative periods from the 1930s to the 1970s. Using around 80 works - sculptures, drawings, photographs and archive material - it also examines his role as a curator, university teacher and networker in post-war West Berlin. It is the first comprehensive retrospective in more than 50 years.

Experimental molding is on view through May 13th at Berlinische Galerie, Alte Jakobstraße 124-128, 10969 Berlin.

Branding as Rebellion in THE CARDS YOU WERE DEALT @ Dittrich & Schlechtriem in Berlin

 
 

Last week, Monty Richthofen performed THE CARDS YOU WERE DEALT, a corporeal intervention in which he explored the concepts of choice, transgenerational dialogue, and transformation through tattooing. Seven participants were randomly selected. In the project, three texts were presented to the chosen participant. These texts are all accounts of 21st century phenomena. If a participant agreed to get one of the texts tattooed, they then got to choose three other texts for the following participant. The placement and composition of the text were decided collaboratively with the artist. The tattoos form a coherent text piece, a physical exquisite corpse, that is painted on a light box, echoing our individual but interconnected experience. THE CARDS YOU WERE DEALT was first performed in September 2023 and most recently included in the 2023 Gallery Weekend Berlin.

THE CARDS YOU WERE DEALT was performed at Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Linienstraße 23, 10178 Berlin.

Garish Queerness as a Mode of Restoration in Pierre le Riche's New Show @ Ronewa Art Projects in Berlin

In Pierre le Riche’s current exhibition, In Four Places at Once, the artist creates vivid figurative wall tapestries that center his queer identity while reflecting on the complexities of belonging in a contemporary world. Identity is woven into and essential to le Riche’s practice; much of his work has been aimed at challenging norms and associations around gender and sexuality and confronting themes of colonialism and white privilege. The group of artworks on show emerged from a period of internal struggle as le Riche acclimatized to a new environment following his move from Cape Town to Aachen, Germany. In this light, le Riche’s choice of tufted yarn as a material, reminiscent of cozy household textiles, feels fitting to conjure a homesick state of yearning and introspection. Le Riche’s use of craft – elsewhere in his practice he also employs embroidery, sewing, and crochet – tosses out outdated notions of gendered art forms. Through his homoerotic content, le Riche pushes back against the conservativeness of a middle-class, suburban upbringing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. His cartoonish nude figures, some sporting exaggerated genitalia, can be read as playfully provocative and unapologetically gay, testing the boundaries of puritanical sensibilities. Simultaneously, his characters are contorted and dislocated in space, imbued with vulnerability, uncertainty, and longing.

In Four Places at Once is on view through March 28th at Ronewa Art Projects, Potsdamer Str. 91, 10785 Berlin.

Non-Specific Objects Carves Niches for Difference from Universality @ Capitain Petzel in Berlin

The title of Non-Specific Objects acts as a counterpoint to the ideas expressed in Donald Judd’s canonical 1964 essay Specific Objects. Seeing as Judd characterized specific objects as separate from either sculpture or painting, they were precisely themselves, emphasizing the very materiality of a specific object that lacked expressive or symbolic content, especially to embodied subjectivity. This universal space, which aimed to be all-encompassing, did not make room for gender, racial, and sexual difference. The artists in this exhibition work against the hegemonic universal, creating space for difference in their works by means of abstraction, referencing bodies both literally and metaphorically.

The selection of works collectively embodies the contemporary lived experience of those who occupy spaces outside the normative. While they often do not overtly mirror the human form, the works represent humanity through a lens of abstraction and resistance, inviting viewers to confront themselves and experience bodily otherness. From alienation and embarrassment to intimacy and desire, the artists offer both the possibility of self-reflection and shared moments of humor.

In focus is the abstracted body – be it the intimate nature, materiality, and particularities of the individual human body, the collective body that is built on shared historic experience, the extended and amplified body in an age of relentless augmentation, or the body that eschews realistic painterly modes of representation, opting for formally abstract or heavily stylized, sometimes nostalgic renditions of humanity. The diverse set of artistic practices does not adhere to strict principles of representation, but continually references the human, sometimes clearly and often obliquely. It highlights objects that refuse human form but relate to the human by embracing abstraction.

Non-Specific Objects is on view through February 24th at Capitain Petzel, Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin.

Wolfgang Voigt Births Rich Yet Minimalist Psychedelia with the Loop Principle @ Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin

In both his musical and pictorial work, Wolfgang Voigt predominantly adheres to strict conceptual principles, which he refines and diversifies consistently. Alongside his mostly sample-based, rather free-abstract to gestural musical and figurative language, it is primarily the “loop principle” that has always fascinated Voigt. The static or varied repetition of minimalistic structures creates certain patterns, grooves, and shapes. This way of thinking is shaped not least by the structure of computer-based music programs, permeating Voigt’s work in various ways.

Whether navigating the tension between 4/4th bass drum-based groove patterns and condensed visual sequences/loops, or reopening the loops and engaging in free-abstract deconstruction (re-enchantment/de-interpretation) – for Wolfgang Voigt, sampling and “the loop” represents a way of perceiving the world. Even when adhering to certain rules and concepts in selecting and processing his source material, he intentionally allows deviations to emerge, often locating what he is “looking for” not in the intended location but in its vicinity. In the virtuoso interplay between “man and machine” he is consistently focused on the simultaneity of strict conceptual minimalism and the hypnotic-psychedelic effect of beginninglessness and endlessness. This encompassed the conceptual-rational observation of surfaces through digital pop art lenses and the creation of intoxicating, shimmering surfaces. And it involves the negation of predictability.

Mit Maschinen Sprechen is on view through April 13th at Galerie Nagel Draxler, Weydingerstraße 2/4, 10178 Berlin.

Springtime at the Scottsdale, Arizona Walmart Turns Commercial Landscapes into Sites of Nostalgic Mundanity @ Galerie Max Hetzler

Known for his paintings of man-made and natural landscapes, Jake Longstreth depicts American suburban and rural scenes with a clarity that is at once disquieting and subtly humorous. Devoid of human presence and bathed in perpetual midday light, these landscapes – among them American big box stores and chain restaurants – draw out a poetry of the everyday with a surprising warmth and painterly affection. Though American commercial developments may be considered a crass or ugly subject matter, Longstreth’s sunny neutrality underscores the fact that most Americans find them neither bleak nor remarkable. So ubiquitous that they are rarely truly seen, the stores and restaurants depicted in these compositions comprise a 21st-century version of the American commons. Longstreth encourages us to linger, be still, look. We might ask ourselves: What has become of these landscapes? What will become of them? Beyond the signature quietude of Longstreth’s landscapes, this body of work underscores the artist’s astute observation of landscapes in transformation. Revealed from unusual vantage points, tenderly rendered wildflowers, foliage, and trees cast dappled shadows on their surroundings, literally and metaphorically throwing into relief the cultivated domain that surrounds them.

Springtime at the Scottsdale, Arizona Walmart, is on view through March 2nd at Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 15/16, Berlin.

Günther Förg's Diverse Utopia-Critical Body of Work Dissected @ Galerie Max Hetzler

 
 

Günther Förg’s comprehensive and multidisciplinary oeuvre, which spans five decades, includes painting, drawing, and murals, as well as sculpture and photography. The focus is on material, color, and space. The artist's experimental approach to abstraction and monochrome painting was directed against the trend toward figuration that prevailed in Germany in the 1980s. His works made continuous reference to 20th-century modernism, whose utopia he critically questioned. In this context, he engaged with art movements as diverse as early modernism, referencing artists such as Edvard Munch, or the American abstract expressionists including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Cy Twombly. Elements of conceptual art can also be found throughout Förg’s work, which additionally challenge traditional interpretations.

Günther Förg is on view through February 24th at Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 45, Berlin.

Gil Kuno's Early Internet Exploration Remains an Electric Testament to Online Creativity in Solo Exhibition @ panke.gallery in Berlin

Gil Kuno’s work is an intricate tapestry of sound art, installations, and video art. His current solo exhibition at Panke Gallery exhibits his earliest art creations – those created on the Internet in the 90s. 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of the first of these creations, Unsound. "Unsound.com" (1994) was a pioneering media experiment that fused sight and sound, allowing users to interactively engage with artists' works in both visual and audio formats. Through crowd-sourcing, it facilitated artistic curation by audience votes – an innovation that even captured the admiration of Timothy Leary, who subsequently endorsed the site. In 1996, Gil Kuno introduced Wiggle, the world's first Internet band. This groundbreaking endeavour leveraged the Internet's connectivity to forge musical collaborations across geographical boundaries, culminating in a band composed of members from Japan, Australia, and the United States. They achieved a major label deal and released multiple albums, all while some band members remained faceless due to their geographically dispersed nature.

Unsound: The Shape of Sound is on view through December 20th at panke.gallery, Hof V, Gerichtstraße 23, 13347 Berlin.

Irony and Intimacy Intersect in Lovers in the Backseat @ FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph in Berlin

“‘Lovers in the Backseat’ refers to romantic and intimate relationships. Everything we do happens because we can't help it: Breathing, living, loving and creating art, these are our common elementary needs." (A.N. & R.S.)

The connection between the works of Robert Schittko and Anna Nero lies in the exploration of identity, playfulness and irony, as well as a slight sexiness that resonates in both artistic practices. They take the exhibition visitor on the "back seat", behind their shoulders, on the motorway, country road or overtaking lane - always on the way, but where are they actually going...? Both Nero and Schittko harbor an aversion to self-referential art. Instead, they explore the self in their studios and transform their lives into a vivid artistic practice. Each in their own way: Schittko's sculptural and photographic art focuses on the development of their own identity. Nero provokes with her abstract-representational paintings and ceramics.

Lovers in the Backseat is on view through January 6th at FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph, Jägerstraße 5, 10117 Berlin.

"Portraiture as Social Commentary" Showcases the Genre's Explosive Social Capital @ Persons Projects in Berlin

 

Zofia Kulik
Land-Escape I (2001)
silver gelatin print, 180 x 150 cm

 

Persons Projects’ latest group exhibition, Portraiture as Social Commentary, not only highlights the different aspects of the genre but also links together a variety of artistic perspectives. A portrait is a painting, a photograph, a sculpture, or any other representation of a person in which the face and its expressions are predominant. They reveal the presence of the subject viewed from the perspective of the artist – a merger of contrasts between what’s projected by one and perceived by another. These images become mirrors of many faces that reflect both the political and cultural undercurrents relevant to the time period in which they were conceived.

Portraiture as Social Commentary is on view through January 27th, 2024, at Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34–35, 10969 Berlin.

Jota Mombaça Uses Berlin's Decompositional History to Slow Time for Mourning @ CCA Berlin

A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP, Jota Momaça’s exhibition at CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts, was conceived, at first, through extensive conversations around the curious topography of Berlin, said to be entirely built atop drained wetlands. From swamp to city, a teleology of progress, a survival scheme, emerges. Looking at the devastating flash floods of 2021 that affected parts of Belgium, Germany and surrounding countries, Mombaça then conjures up reversal—what of cities that again turn into swamps, a form of dissolution fascists went in terror of (‘Drenare la palude!’, once howled a determined Benito Mussolini) throughout the twentieth century? From Berlin’s locality, we shift our gaze towards a planetary predicament: that of atmospheric phenomena continuously threatening terminal collapse across disparate geographies. until the last morning (2023), a newly commissioned video work, was shot among the mangroves and marshlands of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon. Covering about 700,000 hectares, these mangroves and marshlands depend on a constant influx of fresh water from rainfall and from the Guajará Bay rivers and streams. To that end, the camera pans to the sky, observing cloud formations, their movements and maneuvers. The ecosystem’s survival depends on this unpredictable choreography—to observe the weather is thus to forecast whether or not a line of continuity can be drawn into the future. 

A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP is on view through December 2nd at CCA Berlin, Kurfürstenstraße 145, 10785 Berlin.