Ghosts Never Leave: Berlin Gallery Weekend
Installation view of I Sought My Soul, 2025, courtesy Tyger Tyger. Photograph: Trevor Good.
After leaving New York for a few months, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the city was haunting me in Berlin. Many of the artists I had come to know in the US appeared in this year’s Berlin Gallery Weekend. Held each spring, the event features fifty-five participating Berlin galleries and offers a wide-ranging program of exhibitions by both emerging and established artists. This year’s the galleries featured shows from Cyprien Gaillard (Sprüth Magers), Anne Imhof (Galerie Buchholz), Monica Bonvicini (Capitain Petzel), Sky Hopinka (Tanya Leighton), Diane Severin Nguyen (Molitor), Pol Taburet (Schinkel Pavillon), and SoiL Thornton (Galerie Neu), among others.
Although I wasn’t able to squeeze into the crowd for the opening performance by Klára Hosnedlová at Hamburger Bahnhof, I was glad to catch the Czech artist’s posthuman total-installation during its opening week. I also managed to see the final days of I Sought My Soul, the latest exhibition by the curatorial duo Tyger Tyger—Anneli Botz and Tiffany Zabludowicz—at the Church of St. Elisabeth. These two young but well-established curators brought together an impressive group of artists, including Anne Imhof, Ariana Papademetropoulos, David Rappeneau, Ivana Bašić, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jean-Marie Appriou, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Isa Genzken, Jill Mulleady, Kianí Del Valle, Lu Yang, Marguerite Humeau, Mire Lee, Orfeo Tagiuri, Petra Cortright, Qualeasha Wood, Rachel Rossin, and Wynnie Mynerva. Together, they responded to themes of love and the sublime amid the uncertainties of war, AI, and climate collapse.
Another standout moment was the panel discussion Art and Meaning in the Contemporary Age, hosted at KW on the morning of May 4. Led by artist Matt Copson and writer/former Dimes Square figure Dean Kissick, the event featured a group of children on the podium who joined the audience in commenting on a wide range of modern and contemporary artworks projected during the session. The conversation was both refreshing and insightful, and took risks to remind us of the role and relevance of art these days.
Anne Imhof: Cold Hope
Galerie Buchholz | May 2 – June 21, 2025
Installation view of Anne Imhof, Cold Hope, 2025. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz.
After seeing DOOM: House of Hope at the Armory in New York this March, I had high expectations for Anne Imhof’s Cold Hope at Galerie Buchholz, which this time, did not manage to present something extraordinary. She exhibited large-scale oil paintings based on film stills that the artist had photographed on a screen. Within the canvas, she incites blurs and wave-like pixel structures to create a moiré effect—unfortunately, not in the sense of a Gerhard Richter, but rather using color and style in a way that feels more like a pop art solution. Her multiple framed sketches of the Armory’s Drill Hall floorplan also seemed a bit like a suggestion had been made to include something physical and sellable beside the three-hour sound installation Rib of Doom (2025), originally part of the Armory show. Presenting the powerful musical component in a more engaging way might have allowed for a more effective experience.
Cyprian Gaillard: Retinal Rivalry
Sprüth Magers | May 3–July 26, 2025
Cyprien Gaillard, Retinal Rivalry, Installation view, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, May 3–July 26, 2025. Photo: Timo Ohler.
There were shows I returned to multiple times, such as Cyprien Gaillard’s Retinal Rivalry, whose video piece was exhibited alongside fabric-wrapped acoustic panels salvaged from the Museo Revoltella in Trieste. Both works touched on themes of the ghostly. The light violet velvet panels carried the traces of former visitors, the rust of the nails that once held them to the wall, and hand-sewn dancing skeletons—danse macabre figures—stitched along the edges. These were juxtaposed with a single object: Penombra (Prelievo C) (2024), a piece difficult to recognize. A harmonica-like structure, it resembles a medieval helmet or suit of armor more than its original function: to cover an Italian cash machine.
The duality of conservation and decay in this first room leads into the black box theater, to the visual and sonic experience of Retinal Rivalry (2024). The title refers to the perceptual phenomenon that occurs when the brain receives two conflicting images at the same time, causing the neural system to constantly shift between prioritizing one or the other, creating a sense of unease. The video can be watched with 3D glasses, and the experience is deepened by the sound design, which often reattaches field recordings to scenes seemingly at random. The 20-minute quasi-film was shot in public spaces across Germany, mostly devoid of human presence. The shots adopt strange points of view—from inside a trash can or too close to sculptures—creating a constant sense of vertigo and a melancholic atmosphere. The film introduces moments like the memorials of Caspar David Friedrich and Michael Jackson, ghosts of very different kinds. An era, or a history, seems to be disappearing.
Klára Hosnedlová: embrace
Hamburger Bahnhof | May 5 – October 26, 2025
Klára Hosnedlová, CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace, 2025, installation view Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 1.5. – 26.10.2025 © Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser.
On the other hand, Klára Hosnedlová’s expansive solo exhibition, embrace, at Hamburger Bahnhof, while inspired by the industrial history of the artist’s Moravian hometown, gestures toward something more futuristic, posthuman, or post-anthropocene. The enormous forest of sculptures, some reaching nine meters in height, was realized with the support of the CHANEL Prize and spread across the museum’s 2,500-square-meter hall. The tactile and olfactory elements of the raw linen and hemp materials, interwoven with sound, created an immersive total installation. As organic substances (mineral dust, stones, cotton, soil) are cross-fertilized with handcrafted elements (tapestries, embroidery, glass, paintings) and artificial ones (concrete, metal, synthetic resin, styrofoam), the viewer becomes entirely disoriented, not sure whether the scene belongs to the distant future or a prehistoric time. The emotional register is just as unstable: is it nostalgia, or romanticism; dystopia, or utopia? Eventually, the key to understanding might be found in the title: embrace.
Pol Taburet: The Burden of Papa Tonnerre
Schinkel Pavillon | March 29 – July 13, 2025
Installation view of Pol Taburet, The Burden of Papa Tonnerre, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York. Photo: Frank Sperling.
The third pillar of this uncanny atmosphere that unintentionally wove its way into my Gallery Weekend tour (which was reinforced by the unexpected heat of early May) was the young French artist Pol Taburet’s first solo exhibition in Germany, The Burden of Papa Tonnerre at the Schinkel Pavillon. In contrast to aforementioned exhibitions, a deep silence swept through the octagonal rooms of the space, enhanced by thick wall coverings that absorbed all sound. Oil pastel paintings and bronze sculptures depicted creatures that were neither human nor animal. The story behind the works tells of Papa Tonnerre, a mute figure who carries the secrets of his village. Without a voice, he becomes the one everyone confides in, holding their desires, fears, and wrongdoings. Hoping to free himself, he makes a deal with a witch to gain speech, in return for a few stolen objects. But once he can speak, he loses control—exposing everything he once kept hidden. As punishment, he is exiled and cursed to speak forever into the void, never heard again. As is often the case with narrative-driven work, there is little emotion actually conveyed through the pieces. The dark colors, reduced palette, schematic figures, and simple compositions—set against the maddening silence locked into the room—resist emotional immersion. The affect remains suspended, unresolved. In this way, the sense of drama emerges only when the works are viewed collectively, as a Gesamtkunstwerk: a total work of art.
