by Johanna Siegler // May 7, 2025
To wander Kreuzberg during this year’s Gallery Weekend is to surrender to a dérive of some sort. Unlike the choreographed density of other boroughs, where art spaces jostle for attention like storefronts, Kreuzberg requires a slower rhythm, a walking-with rather than walking-to. The exhibitions are scattered, nestled in former industrial complexes, bunkers, backyards—places that feel stumbled upon. One is invited to follow the faint thrum of speakers through alleyways, the clatter of crates being stacked for vernissages and the murmur of conversations bleeding out from behind half-open doors, drawn less by direction than by atmosphere.
We begin our tour early on Friday evening, walking past the cobbled lanes still glistening from a brief spring rain. The air is warm and lightly perfumed with wet stone and budding trees. My first stop is max goelitz, where Nicolás Lamas’ exhibition awaits in a tucked-away space off Rudi-Dutschke-Straße. Inside, the Peruvian artist’s ‘fluid minds’ unfolds as a landscape of artifacts and fragments, staged within a raw, scaffolded skeleton whose ad hoc elements channel the curiosity of passing through an archeological site. Immediately, I am drawn to a work reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s ‘Friendship’ (1963): a golden, circuit-like blueprint that overlays the ruins of an ancient library, merging technological schematics with archaeological decay. Next to the gilded canvas, an assemblage of curious objects, vertebrae made of circuit boards and femurs of fossilized wood, lies arranged in the rough shape of a human form. In an adjoining room, a translucent fridge holds what could be classified as technological fossils. Discarded phone cases, a flute fashioned from a piece of bone, a 3D-printed skull and a prosthetic hand lie arranged on its shelves. A friend who works at max goelitz says most of it has been gleaned from Belgian flea markets–Lamas has been collecting and archiving for years. Throughout the exhibition, the artist’s material superimpositions and arranged objets trouvés elaborately and ingeniously dissolve the boundaries between organic matter and synthetic detritus, suggesting they are part of one interdependent network. The works operate like “thought-devices,” sparking connections between eras and forms, inviting us to imagine new forms of intelligence and memory emerging from this debris.
Nicolás Lamas: ‘fluid minds,’ 2025, installation view // Courtesy of max goelitz and Meessen, copyright the artist, photo by Marjorie Brunet Plaza
A short stroll down Markgrafenstraße brings us to Galerie Barbara Thumm. Outside, puddles from the rain create mirror-like patches on the pavement. We pop into the nearby Lidl and emerge with a tray of sushi. Balancing it on our knees, we eat while observing the gallery’s entrance. There’s a small crowd forming: a mix of art students, collectors in sharp blazers and a couple of curious passersby drawn in by the festive atmosphere of Gallery Weekend. Inside, ‘Spleen,’ Roméo Mivekannin’s show, hangs in large, unframed canvases, freely draped like tapestries or stage backdrops. Each piece appropriates a classic Orientalist painting: odalisques, opulent harems and colonial fantasias, but with a subversive twist. The central figures’ faces have been replaced by the artist’s own visage, painted in high-contrast black and white. The word “spleen” itself calls to mind Baudelaire’s poems on Parisian ennui and melancholy, and here that mood seeps through each canvas. A profound melancholy underlies the gilded exoticism. Standing among these works, one feels the weight of collective memory, an affective saturation of histories, both personal and imperial. As the gallery crowd shuffles quietly, we step out into the courtyard for a moment of air. Dusk has settled, and the wet pavement now gleams under neon signs and streetlights.
Roméo Mivekannin: ‘Spleen,’ 2025, installation view from Galerie Barbara Thumm // Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, photo by Olga Litetskaya
Around the corner lies carlier | gebauer, where Leonor Serrano Rivas’ ‘Here Be Dragons’ promises a plunge into the mythic and unknown. Suspended in the middle of the space is a massive curved mirror screen. The bodies of visitors inside appear halved, revealing high-heeled and gym-shoed legs that either wander or stand attentively among the installation. Inside, the screen reveals a film—a ribbon of 16mm celluloid that loops into a great hoop above our heads. The artist exposed the film with pressed wildflowers and leaves, so ghostly botanical silhouettes are etched directly onto the celluloid. In its center, the visitor encounters a series of strange, delicate sculptures: metallic plant stems and blossoms encrusted in crystals. They stand on thin wires, gently quivering as if alive. Under the soft spotlight, each crystalline flower shimmers; products of a chemical reaction, the exhibition text says, between vegetable acids and mineral solutions that gave birth to these mineral-organic hybrids. It feels as if we have stepped inside a giant zoetrope or the belly of a mythical beast; perhaps this is the dragon of the title, encircling us in its coil. Meanwhile, tapestries on the wall depict swirling underwater scenes (the product of magnets and pigments choreographed to mimic tides), reinforcing Rivas’ interweaving of myth and science. I catch references to Ursula K. Le Guin’s wizardry and Donna Haraway’s eco-philosophy in the brochure, yet the installation never feels didactic. As we depart carlier | gebauer, stepping back onto the sidewalk, I have the distinct sensation that the boundary between my body and the humid night air has blurred. The city around me hums: Kreuzberg’s weekend revelers, the rumble of night buses, the rustle of trees.
Leonor Serrano Rivas: ‘Here Be Dragons,’ 2025, exhibition view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin // Courtesy of the artist and carlier | gebauer, Berlin, photo © Andrea Rossetti
On Sunday, dusk had settled by the time we reached EBENSPERGER. Their Kreuzberg space is set in the monumental cylindrical Fichtebunker, a World War II gas tank-turned-bunker, which tonight feels like an adventure in itself. The walls are thick concrete; the air is markedly cooler, tinged with a slightly dank odor of old stone. This setting proves an ideal backdrop for Ludwig Schönherr’s ‘Elektronikfilme,’ a series of works that flicker to life at the end of the gallery’s ground floor. Down a narrow passage, screens glow cold like portals, humming low with a syncopated buzz. The darkness is sliced by rapid-fire bursts of color and light: Schönherr’s experimental Super 8 films are playing on loop, their images abstract and hypnotic. One screen shows a rapid montage of 1960s television clips, faces and figures flashing by, intercut with frames of pure color: electric blues, neon reds. I’m transfixed by one film in particular, in which a female figure twirls against a flickering TV static background; her outline disintegrating into red and white afterimages with each spin. I later learn this dancer was Schönherr’s wife, a muse captured from broadcast TV and transformed into an avant-garde apparition. These associative televisual loops, created by filming the TV itself, oscillate between the televised world and reality, between Pop Art’s bright palette and Fluxus-like subversion. They possess an almost prophetic quality; though made in 1968, they could be mistaken for a contemporary video installation probing media overload. The hypnotic stroboscopic lights and the claustrophobic setting induce a slight dizziness, an aesthetic vertigo. We stumble out of EBENSPERGER back into the fresh night, the phantom afterglow of ‘Elektronikfilme’ still dancing behind my eyes.
Ludwig Schönherr: ‘Electronic No. 18 (Series Red),’ 1968, Super 8, silent, 28´ // Courtesy of Zoom Ludwig Schönherr Labor
By nightfall, we are drawn into the massive hall of Kraftwerk, the former power plant turned cultural venue, for the finissage performance of Laure Prouvost’s installation ‘WE FELT A STAR DYING.’ We arrive to the sound of droning synths echoing through the colossal concrete nave. The space is dark, save for erratic constellations of light projected on the ceiling. The crowd is the largest I’ve seen all weekend: hundreds gather on the ground floor, craning our necks upward and all around. At 9pm, gentle “ping” tones and vibrations ripple through the crowd. The QR codes handed to us earlier have triggered sound pulses on our devices, effectively turning the audience into a dispersed speaker system. A troop of brass players starts to play a soft, dissonant harmony. The surprise of tubas and trumpets sounding from our midst draws delighted gasps. The mingling crowd of flesh-and-blood performers and smartphone-wielding participants is drawn upstairs like a hive, as the performance continues with a sudden hush and the emergence of two figures standing atop a scaffold-like stage amid Prouvost’s installation, hanging threads and a giant sculptural cosmic snail. Musician-producer KUKII’s voice rings out, low and incantatory, while electronic artist Howie Lee layers in undulating electronic beats. Then, the quantum cosmology behind Prouvost’s exhibition sharpens into focus: Collectivity not as abstraction, but as lived relation. A shockwave of cheers, some hesitant, some emphatic, ripples through the hall as the singer speaks to us, investing the night’s refrain, ‘we are we,’ with a political note that cuts through the artifice and connects the ceremony to real-world urgency.
Laure Prouvost: ‘WE FELT A STAR DYING,’ 2025, installation view at Kraftwerk Berlin, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and co-commissioned by OGR Torino // © Laure Prouvost, photo by Andrea Rossetti
In the span of this year’s Gallery Weekend, Kreuzberg’s art offerings have led me through a spectrum of sensations and themes: from Lamas’ techno-archaeological meditations to Schönherr’s flickering media phantoms; culminating in Prouvost’s affective, participatory rite. Each stop explored a kind of distributed agency, whether the hive minds of insects, the shared complicity of viewers, the interweaving of human and nonhuman forces, or the collective voice of a crowd. Exiting Kraftwerk, I notice the night sky over Berlin has cleared. A few stars are visible above the silhouette of the TV Tower in the distance. As we make our way home, still reverberating from the weekend’s impressions, I carry with me a gently renewed faith in art’s ability to forge critical communities in the most unexpected of ways.
Exhibition Info
max goelitz
Nicolás Lamas: ‘fluid minds’
Exhibition: May 2-July 5, 2025
maxgoelitz.com
Rudi-Dutschke-Straße 26, 10969 Berlin, click here for map
Galerie Barbara Thumm
Roméo Mivekannin: ‘Spleen’
Exhibition: May 3-June 21, 2025
bthumm.de
Markgrafenstraße 68, 10969 Berlin, click here for map
carlier | gebauer
Leonor Serrano Rivas: ‘Here Be Dragons’
Exhibition: May 2-June 21, 2025
carliergebauer.com
Markgrafenstraße 67, 10969 Berlin, click here for map
Ebensperger
Ludwig Schönherr: ‘Elektronikfilme’
Exhibition: May 3-June 28, 2025
ebensperger.net
Fichtebunker, Fichtestraße 6, 10967 Berlin, click here for map
