by Johanna Siegler // June 24, 2025
“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 attention to life as it is lived.
The breadth of ‘For Real For Real’ is massive, with over 60 contributors (15 with works in the group show), each singular, each situated; an assemblage of subjectivities doing life in real time. Within the framework of an exhibition that claims “being” as both method and matter, such multiplicity, deliberately rejecting essentialist fixities, makes sense. And yet, this abundance poses the structural question of how to allow these voices the space to unfurl with the depth and contextual nuance their specificity demands. If the exhibition proposes that being, in all its fractured, exhausted, playful and resistant forms, is itself a legitimate narrative, then its challenge lies in making legible how these beings speak. In its strongest moments, the works grow more assertive in the shared presentation and through each other; in others, the thread frays and the proposition dissipates into multiplicity without cohesion.
‘FOR REAL FOR REAL,’ exhibition view at daadgalerie, 2025 // Photo by Diana Pfammatter
What does it mean to inherit a body when that body is historical material and living archive? ‘For Real For Real’ opens with two distinct meditations on this question. Kara Walker’s early sketch for ‘Gone’ offers a fragile yet furious first trace of her later silhouettes, a rehearsal of historical trauma rendered in faint lines. In contrast, John Akomfrah’s ‘The Call of Mist’ drifts through a shrouded landscape of mourning, where memory, loss and the speculative technologies of cloning are explored in a slow, elegiac reflection. Together, these works articulate two poles of embodied remembrance between the violence of history and the fog of grief and futurity. They propose that remembrance is labor and that aliveness, in the wake of history, is never without cost.
‘FOR REAL FOR REAL,’ exhibition view at daadgalerie, 2025 // Photo by Diana Pfammatter
After this pair, the exhibition’s trajectory turns toward the stuff of everyday life with works that center the objects and thoughts that populate the scaffold of our daily routines, across labor and recreation. A central wall holds Harmony Holiday’s film ‘Abide With Me (2024),’ a lush, melancholic 37-minute montage that reaches into the annals of Black musical history, from Thelonious Monk to Azealia Banks, to reveal the inner life of these cultural icons. Holiday’s concept of the “Black backstage” names a fugitive interior space where Black performers retreat from the spectacle of public life into zones of quiet and self-making. Across her work, including ‘Abide With Me,’ this space, remixing archival fragments and invoking myth and memory, works to restore complexity to figures flattened by mainstream media visibility. On the back of the projection wall, a certain affective undercurrent proposed by Holiday’s piece flows into ‘Dante 9–5 (2013),’ Garrett Bradley’s quiet portrait of a Black postal worker moving through the mundane rhythms of labor. There is no obvious drama, only the subtle poetry of clocking in and out, of hands performing repetitive tasks and brief glances of camaraderie. The inferno of the title nods to the dull burn of capitalist time, but Bradley’s camera renders this sentence oddly tender.
Dozie Kanu: ‘Headboard (Caribbean Sea Luxury Tax 50 Mental Space),’ 2025 // Photo by Diana Pfammatter
What follows these sequences of labor are moments of rest and meditations on its often withheld promise. Dozie Kanu’s ‘Headboard (Caribbean Sea Luxury Tax 50 Mental Space)’ is a glossy, black-lacquered bed frame interrupted by red-toned panels with fragments of Nigerian industrial advertisements. One declares “I am an industrialist with bags of confidence,” while two photographs of luxury yachts that shimmer like distant windows, rendered in a holo dream-logic that refracts the seductive mirage of prosperity and the glinting promise of social ascent. Juxtaposing domestic intimacy with capitalist aspiration, the piece is anchored in the absurd rhetoric of success, where sleep is haunted by ambition, extraction and the psychic toll of diasporic desire. Vis-à-vis, Carrie Mae Weems’ ‘In Love, In Trouble, Out of Time’ extends on this mental space, opening a velvety aperture onto the shadowed underside of everyday psychic life. Set against Hugh Ragin’s searching, melancholic jazz piece ‘Feel the Sunshine,’ the short follows two women lying restless on a bed, their gestures tender yet charged, between comfort and confrontation. It remains deliberately unclear whether they are sisters, lovers or temporal reflections of the same self. The narration is prismatic, voices overlap, yet beneath it all lingers an overwhelming silence and a sense of unresolve.
Martine Syms: ‘She Mad: The Non Hero, Parts 1-4,’ 2021 // Photo by Diana Pfammatter
Across the room, Martine Syms’ ‘The Non-Hero’ picks up this thread of inner turbulence, but refracts it through the cool, compulsive language of the digital. Part of Syms’ ongoing ‘She Mad’ series, ‘The Non-Hero’ plays out on a floating phone screen, where a semi-fictional Syms narrates her rise in the art world alongside spirals of depression, isolation and the seduction of self-erasure. “Life doesn’t actually fit into any story,” Syms has said in an interview. “Often it doesn’t make sense in that way.” ‘The Non-Hero’ epitomizes precisely that. Its edits are fast, its tone deadpan and laced with irony, but beneath the surface runs a steady inquiry into how we tell ourselves into being and how that self splinters under the pressure to be legible or exceptional.
‘FOR REAL FOR REAL,’ exhibition view at daadgalerie, 2025 // Photo by Diana Pfammatter
From these predominantly screen-based works, the exhibition transitions into a space where form begins to dissolve into something more theatrical. It is a shift that, while spatially expansive, introduces a sense of disorientation and diffuses the exhibition’s initial clarity of attention. Yuval Pudik’s ‘Untitled (Nine Eleven)’ and Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s ‘Swirl’ continue the inquiry into scripted identity and self-fashioning. Pudik’s wall-sized lattice of phone-screenshot posters stages an absurdist inventory of performed masculinities, while Nguyen’s kinetic bamboo sculpture crystallizes, for a fleeting instant, into the face of a man, only to dissolve again into motion. Both works invoke (il)legibility and role-play, extending Syms’ concern with how selves are constructed under surveillance and imposed desires to self-mythologize.
‘FOR REAL FOR REAL,’ exhibition view at daadgalerie, 2025 // Photo by Diana Pfammatter
It is in the closing movement of ‘For Real For Real’ that the exhibition undergoes a quiet but decisive tonal shift. Gestures of play are carried forward into a register of attrition, presenting works that chronicle the body as something weathered and weighted, held in form under daily pressure. Mel Chin’s ‘Headstone’ (2025), ‘Pressed Recollections (2024/2025) and ‘Auditory Pathology’ (2025) form a triad of fatigue. The scene of a withdrawn figure rendered in dense graphite that appears almost liquefied into a sofa with heavy limbs, is translated sculpturally in ‘Headstone,’ where a chunk of granitic rock that loosely resembles a human head rests atop a plush teal cushion. The absurd juxtaposition of weight and softness becomes an allegory of affective burden, emblematic of Chin’s long-standing interest in institutional neglect and environmental trauma. This gravity finds poignant resonance in Jennifer Packer’s ‘Untitled’ (2021) and a textual work by Claudia Rankine that ends in the final plea to “slow life the fuck down.” Together, this assemblage echoes what Sara Ahmed has once evoked through the figure of the stone: a slow hardening under pressure, a form of survival forged through unyieldingness. Here, the affective burden placed by society and its infrastructures—on certain lives more than others—condenses into material form.
‘FOR REAL FOR REAL,’ exhibition view at daadgalerie, 2025 // Photo by Diana Pfammatter
After this sequence, we are left with a fitting sense of exhaustion that is perhaps intentional, perhaps symptomatic of the show’s ambition to hold multiplicity without always parsing it. The initial concern proves warranted: the complexity and singularity of each artistic practice, with its tempo, stakes and structures of address, risk being subsumed into a diffuse affective register. Works like ‘The Non-Hero’ underscore precisely this danger: the way lives can be collapsed into readability or reduced to tone. While the show’s many presences resonate, they do not always align (nor should they), but their overlap occasionally feels imposed rather than structurally thought through. ‘For Real For Real’ flirts, perhaps unwittingly, with its own simulacrum, risking the hyperreal double of what it seeks to hold; not “being,” but its image as composite affect. In moments, the real withdraws into the density. To be sure, emotional contours and thematic trajectories do surface, particularly when the exhibition is viewed with patience and attention. And the accompanying program of screenings and talks, as well as the upstairs reading room, offer crucial frameworks that extend and ground the show’s ambition. Still, one is left wishing for more sustained curatorial intervention within the exhibition itself: not to explain or label, but to situate and to clarify the stakes of bringing them together.
Exhibition Info
daadgalerie
Group Show: ‘For Real For Real’
Exhibition: May 16-July 27, 2025
berliner-kuenstlerprogramm.de
Oranienstraße 161, 10969 Berlin, click here for map
