Reviews – Berlin Art Link

Personifying the River: Tatort Paderborn 2025

Alison Hugill — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 09:30:27 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Water. After more than a decade, Tatort Paderborn—a series of site-specific exhibitions aimed at reappraising Paderborn’s public space, which started in 2007 and ran through 2014—made its return to the West-German city with a third instalment titled ‘Der Fluss bin ich’ (I am the River). The river in question, the Pader, is the subject and setting of this…

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Fantasy and Freedom: Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts

Adela Lovric — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 12:22:11 +0000

For the uninitiated, the name Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts might be misleading. What began as a bi-annual survey of global fine art printmaking, based on the principle of national representation, has long since outgrown its original frame. Over the decades, it has evolved into a curated exhibition of contemporary art, with each edition shaped by a new curator, artist or collective.

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Peeking: Navot Miller’s ‘Paradise’ at Dittrich & Schlechtriem

Lars Holdgate — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 09:16:55 +0000

The stairs leading down into the basement are enveloped in color. It’s not yet 7PM; there’s nothing to see. Shiny sheets obscure the works. A lonely shower curtain with colorful stripes stands guard on the back room’s central wall. It is itself an attraction. People crowd into a shrinking basement and eagerly await the big reveal. The space feels somewhat empty. Slim windows at the top of the…

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Maintenance Is a Drag: Ghislaine Leung at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

Alison Hugill — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:57:47 +0000

One of the first things I notice when entering the space is a discarded piece of paper—a candy wrapper—crumbled up on the floor. Trash. It’s a minor occurrence, but in the almost empty space, it stands out. Tape lines mark the floor, and cracks and holes punctuate the walls. Dust gathers in the corners. Ghislaine Leung presents the ground floor of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) “left as it is.

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Haptic Yearning: Toyin Ojih Odutola at Hamburger Bahnhof

Alison Hugill — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 09:50:12 +0000

Hamburger Bahnhof, as we know it, has only existed since the late 1980s. Previously the terminal station of the Hamburg-Berlin line, the train station was converted into a transportation museum, before becoming the contemporary art hub it is today. Back to its roots, the museum’s east cabinet has been transformed into a train station once more by Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola.

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Tactile Engagement: Lygia Clark at Neue Nationalgalerie

Alison Hugill — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 09:37:44 +0000

Art history likes clairvoyants. Divine as a tea leaf, the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark heralded not one, but three casualties of the field: the death of painting, the death of the author, the death of the autonomous art object. If everything Clark happened to be around seemed to die shortly after, she also guaranteed that the lessons of each experiment found atavistic form in later work…

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Doing Life in Real Time: ‘For Real For Real’ at daadgalerie

Alison Hugill — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 12:48:35 +0000

“How can we, as workers of the imaginary, recognize the significance and poetics of being when all manners of racism, war, and patriarchal violence redirect the gaze from our indisputable presence?” This guiding provocation from the exhibition ‘For Real For Real’ at daadgalerie, curated by poet Claudia Rankine and The Racial Imaginary Institute, sets a tone of urgency, foregrounding a practice of…

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Dreaming Outside the Law: ‘Magical Realism’ at WIELS

Alison Hugill — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 09:12:42 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Legality. On a small, princess-pink television on the fifth floor of the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, an animated bear smokes a blunt as a spectral voice recounts a run-in with the police that nearly devolved into violence. The film is Nigerian-American poet Precious Okoyomon’s ‘It’s dissociating season’ (2019), and the narrator is her…

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Productive Hope: ‘Fixing Futures’ at MGGU

Adela Lovric — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 13:28:48 +0000

At the Museum Giersch of Goethe University (MGGU) in Frankfurt am Main, the group exhibition ‘Fixing Futures. Planetary Futures between Speculation and Control’ gathers clashing, converging and contesting visions of tomorrow. Partnering with the graduate school Fixing Futures and the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) of the Goethe University Frankfurt, the museum presents 15 artistic…

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Keeping Close: Ritual and Grief at Bärenzwinger Berlin

Alison Hugill — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 08:54:05 +0000

The history of Bärenzwinger Berlin is unique. The space opened as a bear enclosure in August 1939, housing Urs, Vreni, Lotte and Jule, who were all gifts from the city of Bern to mark the 700th anniversary of Berlin’s founding in 1937. Since then, the small brick building in the middle of Köllnischen Park has been buried under rubble, restored, filled with new bear inhabitants, seen the birth of…

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Deep Time and Digital Art: Elektron Luxembourg’s ‘Hybrid Futures’

Alison Hugill — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 07:39:23 +0000

If that impossible longue durée history could be written from the perspective of the animals that co-inhabit our planet, one would first have to settle the question of what—how! and in what sense!—the animals call us in their minds. “Proper names probably not,” writes Anne Carson in ‘Red Doc>.’ “Do they even have pronouns? Do they experience the entire cold sorrow acre of human history as one…

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Conditions for Living: Gala Porras-Kim’s Exhibition-in-Print

Alison Hugill — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:59:45 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Legality. In 2017, the government of New Zealand Aotearoa granted personhood to the Whanganui River, legislation that “combined Western legal precedent with Māori understanding of the river as an indivisible and living whole, and as the spiritual ancestor of the Whanganui Iwi (a Māori tribe).” This definition is not only a protective measure but marks a…

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