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.

Suburban Atmospherics: Read Our Interview of Olivia Erlanger →

 

Olivia Erlanger
Prime Meridien, 2024
Aquaresin, aluminum, LEDs, drivers, cord
59 1/2 x 71 x 36 inches
(151.1 x 180.3 x 91.4 cm)
Image Courtesy of Soft Opening, London. Photo: Daniel Terna

 

Multimedia artist and filmmaker Olivia Erlanger is a suburbanist in multiple senses of the word: her oeuvre, a combination of sculpture, scale miniatures and shadow boxes, furnishings, short films, performance, as well as vernacular and technical histories of the home, takes its inspiration from American suburban geographies and the domestic interior that form its primary mise en scène. But Erlanger’s work also explores the world of margins, thresholds, and coulisse implicit in the etymology of the sub-urb—a space that, by definition, is beneath or outside of a physical and discursive center. Hers is a work that often eschews the stabilizing components of characterization, materiality, and setting for what, absent a sturdier, more easily translatable, descriptor, might be called a suburban atmospheric.

But what precisely is a suburban atmospheric? Beyond its seeming interest in combining the milieu of the suburb with a study of speculative environments, the term remains labile and fugitive, as atmosphere tends to be. The topic of suburbanism is itself obscured in a certain kind of epistemic veil, enforced by an enduring urban-centric ambivalence toward its historical or cultural import that says indignantly, “I’d prefer not to.” The suburb has long been the subaltern to its urban hegemon. Equally, the notion of an atmosphere is resistant to any center. It is neither material/spatial nor strictly rhetorical or conceptual, but more like an environmental “mood” accompanying these objects or categories. Peter Sloterdijk, the great thinker of atmosphere, describes it as an affective envelope that shelters self, other and world in various existential interiors. Its ur-space is the home, whether hut or tract house, though the feeling of at-homeness is as much an architecture of familiarity as it is materiality. Atmosphere, however, will always retain some essential mystery or exoticism. Appearing in disguise under designations like “the sensorium,” “the spectral,” “interiority,” “microclimate,” and “the nobject,” it haunts the world of people and objects from its dark purlieus, much like the suburb haunts the city and thrives in the nooks and verges.

Erlanger’s works hover in this same elusive topology with its outré images of possessed housewares, adolescent bedrooms in miniature, deteriorating snow globes, manic realty agents, piscine nymphets, and trompe l’œil terraria. Evoking the sort of Gothic unheimlich that emanates from a landscape of empty cul-de-sacs, dead shopping malls, and vacant ranch ramblers, they play in the interstices of the quotidian and the storybook. The result is a spiritist practice that is simultaneously an “anthropology of the near,” in the words of Marc Augé, and a “space of elsewhere,” in those of Gaston Bachelard. And, perhaps, most of all, Erlanger’s works echo Longfellow’s observation in “Haunted Houses” (1858) that “All houses…/Are haunted houses/…The spirit-world around this world of sense/Floats like an atmosphere…”

On the occasion of Erlanger’s new exhibit, Spinoff, at Luhring Augustine Tribeca, the artist spoke on a variety of topics, including the mysteries of the suburb, the pleasures of the miniature, Last Year at Marienbad and the haunted house genre, Nabokov and the “final girl.” Read more.

Berlin Atonal Combines Ritual, Installation, and Performance in an Exploration of Ephemerality

 

Florentina Holzinger
Etúde for Church (2023)
Image credit: Mayra Wallraff

 

Berlin Atonal immerses audiences in constant states of change and fluctuating intensity, where seemingly static artworks defy any rigidity. In Florentina Holzinger’s Études, stunt effects meet the world of music to create scores for bodies as instruments. At Atonal, the artist presents Étude For Church, a performance in which a two-ton iron bell is asked to ‘call in the canonical hours, summon tempests and awake the sleeping soul’.

Bridget Polk
Reclaimed Damages (2023)
Image credit: Frankie Casillo

Bridget Polk will be present throughout the exhibition, reconfiguring Reclaimed Damages by assembling precarious sculptural forms over time, in dialogue with the audience and other works in the exhibition that manifest in ephemeral reflections on the past, present, and personal.

Mire Lee
Installation view
Image Credit: Frankie Casillo

Mire Lee has created a hanging fabric installation, where worn-out, torn, and ripped fabrics are dipped in viscous liquid clay. Over the course of its exhibition, the clay absorbed by the "skin" of the work will be slowly thinned down by water. It promises a misty viscerality as a space to question human fantasies of technologies that contradict the realities of subjects that decay and deform through time.

Cyprien Gaillard
Absorbent Figure (2023)
Image courtesy of artist

Cyprien Gaillard’s "Absorbent Figure" is based on an existing object found by the artist at the Kijk-Kubus-museum house in Rotterdam. While the meaning of the statue is widely debated, the design is similar to the ‘weeping Buddha,’ and one interpretation is that those who touch it will feel a mysterious alleviation of their sorrows. With its new industrial skin, the figure sits outside Kraftwerk amidst those gathering, taking part in the collective experiences of music and nightlife.

Atonal features visual art and concert nights intermittently through 9/17 at Köpenicker Str. 70, 10179 Berlin.

Eva Fàbregas Expansive Installation Immerses Visitors in a Blurring of the Organic & Technical in Devouring Lovers @ Hamburger Banhof in Berlin

Eva Fàbregas takes over the historical hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof with a monumental, site-specific installation. Her biggest solo exhibition to date expands the boundaries of sculpture, inviting visitors to a sensual, spatial experience. Biomorphous sculptures transform the museum's architecture, which is characterized by industrial iron girders, into an organically grown space.

With this new commission, Fàbregas responds to the passage-like architecture of Hamburger Bahnhof’s main historical hall. The soft and bodily objects, characteristic of her work, spread out throughout the entire space, from the sides, from the ceiling, and through the metal structures. Slight vibrations and movements emanating from them cannot be clearly identified, but are almost physically perceptible. The mix of sculpture and movement reorients the visitors’ experience of the hall. The borders between technically generated and the human and non-human worlds become blurred. Visitors find themselves immersed in a surreal organic-technical environment.

Devouring Lovers is on view through January 1st, 2024, at the Hamburger Banhof Museum of Contemporary Art, Invalidenstraße 50-51, 10557 Berlin

Watch Both Teasers Of "MIASMA", A Live Installation By Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine @ Trauma Bar und Kino In Berlin

Drawing from Ligottian horror, MIASMA takes place in an unnamed seaside town in the artists’ home region of Northern England where a blackened volcanic hole opens below an abandoned car park. The work incorporates 3D design, neo-noir film, and the Japanese dance theatre of Butoh to unearth sensations of dread, mourning, and alienation.

MIASMA autopsies the corpse of post-industrial urbanity, carving out its wounds in unparalleled catharsis: an encounter with darkness that oscillates between the solemn and abrasive.

In Thomas Ligotti’s The Shadow at The Bottom of The World, a strange profusion surfaces and exhausts itself into the atmosphere, afflicting the air, vegetation, and people in a nearby town—ultimately turning a familiar place into an estranged version of itself. This duality becomes the subject of Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine’s (Tom Heyes) debut audio-visual installation, MIASMA.

These uncanny dispositions frequently appear throughout MIASMA, within crowds of twisted and curled faces, as characters and dancers stagger past illegible signs of defunct businesses—a gesture to Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: “You suppose that you could be in familiar territory … few landmarks. The tracks have numbers, not names. You can listen to them in any order. The point is to get lost.”

Live and recorded Butoh alchemize MIASMA’s provocations into a visceral, unnatural domain, forcing viewers to take part in the mutative rift that opens, not only across the towns, but also within the minds of its inhabitants and visitors.

Through the virtual and choreographic, MIASMA conducts its autopsy on the town’s post-industrial corpse, carving out its wounds in the act of unparalleled catharsis: an embrace and respondent transformation to darkness characterised by its balance of the intimate and abrasive.

Text by Matt Dell

MIASMA will be on view this Saturday, October 22 at 21:00 @ Trauma Bar und Kino Heidestraße 50, 10557 Berlin

Video by Hannah Rose Stewart
Graphic design by Jordi Theler
Ue5 development by Filip Setmanuk Soundtrack by Blackhaine, Croww, Rainy Miller

Video Block
Double-click here to add a video by URL or embed code. Learn more

Luis Camnitzer's Towards an Aesthetic of Imbalance @ Alexander Gray Associates in New York

In 1988, Luis Camnitzer represented Uruguay in the 43rd Venice Biennale, where he produced a series of works that combined physical objects, printed images, and text. In the context of the end of Uruguay’s military dictatorship (1973–1984), these works addressed themes of torture, abuse of power, and repression, combining seemingly disparate elements to elicit poetic interpretations. Despite political instability during the transition to democracy, Camnitzer agreed to participate in the Biennale, realizing that “keeping one’s purity could be in the way of more important things like the cementing of a regained democracy.” Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Camnitzer built upon the political themes in his work, developing new series and projects, including The Agent Orange Series (1985) and Los San Patricios (1992). Conceptually building on the work he debuted eight years prior at the Venice Biennale, Camnitzer presented El Mirador in 1996 at the São Paulo Biennial. Consisting of an enclosed room that is only visible to the viewer through a narrow slit in the wall, El Mirador evokes multiple spaces of confinement: a prison cell, a psychiatric hospital, and a torture chamber. Various objects are placed throughout the white-walled room, which is starkly lit with glaring light, lending the installation a surreal quality. In this tableaux, uncanny elements are gathered––an iron bed frame with a single glass sheet as a mattress, a shattered wall mirror, a house of playing cards, and a window with panes made of Astroturf grass––resulting in a hallucinatory aura, meant to destabilize the viewer’s initial interpretations.

Towards an Aesthetic of Imbalance is on view throughout Feb. 15th at Alexander Gray Associates 510 West 26 Street, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the Alexander Gray Associates

Olafur Eliasson: In real life @ Tate Modern in London

Olafur Eliasson: In real life marks the most comprehensive solo presentation of the artist’s work, and his first major survey in the UK. Eliasson consistently seeks to make his art relevant to society, engaging the public in memorable ways both inside and outside the gallery. Driven by his interests in perception, movement, and the interaction of people and their environments, he creates artworks which offer experiences that can be shared by all visitors. The exhibition also examines Eliasson’s engagement with issues of climate change, sustainable energy, migration, as well as architecture. Olafur Eliasson: In real life offers a timely opportunity to experience the immersive world of the endlessly inquisitive artist.

Olafur Eliasson: In real life is on view through January 5, 2020 at Tate Modern Bankside, London SE1 9TG. photographs courtesy of Tate Modern

Read Our Interview Of Lauren Halsey On The Occasion Of Her Funkadelic Installation At MOCA Los Angeles →

Lauren Halsey’s dream-world is cosmic, funky, carpeted, and technicolored; an atemporal, fantastical, and hyperreal vision of black liberation which she conjures via site-specific installations that celebrate her childhood home. Click here to read more.

Highlights from Olafur Eliasson's Reality Projector Experience @ The Marciano Art Foundation

Reality Projector is a site-specific installation created for the foundation’s expansive first floor Theater Gallery. Eliasson has conceived of a seemingly simple, yet complex installation that uses projected light and the existing architecture of the space to create a dynamic shadow play. The artwork references the space’s former function as a theater as well as the history of filmmaking in the city by turning the entire space into an abstract, three-dimensional film. Eliasson’s exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to fully experience the magnificence of the space free of objects. Reality Projector will be on view beginning March 1, 2018 and will remain on view until August. photographs by Oliver Kupper