Feature Topics – 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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Wet Rituals: An Interview with Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo

Alison Hugill — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 09:57:08 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Water. Collaborators since 2018, the artists Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo have worked together to bring numerous projects to life. Water is at the center of their recent work, ‘Tributaries: a Wet Ritual for Witnessing,’ in which groups gather near bodies of water to consider the ways in which water is used, preserved and abused in contemporary life and…

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Ministry of Sewers: An Interview with Cooking Sections

Alison Hugill — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 12:43:30 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Water. No swimming. Years—decades, centuries—of industrial runoff, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, detergents, oil and sewage have turned Kent’s coastal areas into a place fit only for…taking photos. The London-based collective Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe)—who often work at the intersection of art, architecture…

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Letter from the Editor: Water

Alison Hugill — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 13:02:14 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Water. While ‘Water’ might just seem like a refreshing topic for summer, especially as we’re launching into Berlin’s first major heatwave of the year, its meanings in contemporary art and theory are more circumspect, with references drawing from texts like Astrida Neimanis’ ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’ and Kamau Braithwaite’s more…

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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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Material Witnessing: An Interview with Susan Schuppli

Alison Hugill — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:54:35 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Legality. The judicial system is both intimidating and beguiling—a complex web of ritualized procedures enacted in hallowed, semi-public chambers, administered by (mostly) men dressed in long black or red robes. In our video call, artist and academic Susan Schuppli likens it to a “dramaturgy,” a “choreopolitics” whose workings are highly coded and whose…

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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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Restorative Laughter: An Interview with Zasha Colah

Alison Hugill — Fri, 23 May 2025 07:07:10 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Legality. The 13th Berlin Biennale, which brings together over 60 artists and presents more than 170 works, will open on June 13th at four venues across the city—KW, Hamburger Bahnhof, Sophiensaele and a former courthouse in Moabit. Biennale curator, Zasha Colah—assisted by Valentina Viviani—has just announced the title of this year’s show: ‘passing the…

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The Carceral Sublime: An Interview with Sable Elyse Smith

Alison Hugill — Fri, 16 May 2025 09:55:35 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Legality. Sable Elyse Smith’s works explore the strange dimensionalities created by the American legal system. The nature of contemporary carceral culture is totalizing, from a media sphere dominated by everything from sensationalized manhunts to prison furniture designed to enforce and reify a vulgar order of violence. Smith’s works explore the uneven…

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Letter from the Editor: Legality

Alison Hugill — Fri, 09 May 2025 08:12:53 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Legality. The term “extralegality” gets at something beyond the legal-illegal binary: it suggests a work-around that questions the sharply, yet arbitrarily, delineated moral boundaries of the law. In the US right now, the topic of “undocumented immigrants” (or “illegal aliens” as the Trump administration has labelled them) has taken a central position in…

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Being Weird in Public: Leigh Bowery at Tate Modern

Alison Hugill — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 12:42:43 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Public. The exhibition ‘Leigh Bowery!’ at Tate Modern charts the gloriously brazen, glitzy and gender-bent life of the eponymous icon of the 80s London club scene. Between Leigh Bowery’s signature sequinned gimp masks, the smutty postcards he sent to friends, fizzy party pics from the nightclub Taboo, and a spangling collection of artworks where he…

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Quiet Acts of Resistance: An Interview with Igor Grubić

Alison Hugill — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:17:57 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Public. My gateway into activist and artist Igor Grubić’s practice was equal parts jarring and cathartic. Croatian and Serbian voices shouting, gunfire and Missy Elliot’s 2001 hit ‘Get Ur Freak On’ blared across Berlin’s Nome gallery before I could see the source of the commotion. Grubić’s two-channel video ‘East Side Story’ (2006-08) portrays the…

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