by Eve Rogers // Nov. 7, 2025
At the foot of the PalaisPopulaire’s spiral staircase, a projected pool of water shimmers across the floor. Beneath its surface, a fragment of text reads: “heavy is the root of light, as the old philosophers say, how we stand here is important, how we breathe.” Drawing on the teachings of Daoist texts and the poetry of William Stafford, the line invites a moment of pause before ascent, setting a tone of stillness and attention from the outset.
The path through ‘Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take’ feels both like a pilgrimage and a dream. As the 2025 Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year, Charmaine Poh transforms the gallery into a passage inward: a choreography of reflection, philosophy and fluidity, where mirrors, pools, voices and screens circle back in seamless harmony.
Charmaine Poh: ‘Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take,’ 2025, installation view PalaisPopulaire // Photo by Mathias Schormann, © Charmaine Poh
In a dimly lit vestibule, a rock pool cradles two jade bangles. It stands in quiet confidence as both a ripple of the previous image and a gesture toward the world ahead, one which Poh has conjured with precision, weaving multiple dimensions to explore power, identity, feminism and queerness. I take note.
Beyond the veil of a fringe curtain, the first chamber houses three works from Poh’s ‘Young Body’ series, forming a constellation around E-Ching, an avatar constructed from footage of the role Poh once played in a Singaporean television show, as a child actor. Using deepfake technology, she resurrects her younger self as a pixelated echo, flickering between innocence and unease.
Charmaine Poh: ‘public solitude,’ 2022, two-channel digital video, synthetic deepfake media, Deepfake, 4 min // © Charmaine Poh
In ‘Good Morning Young Body,’ the avatar appears as a miniature, off-pitch newscaster of sorts, presenting the myriad injustices of girlhood in the spotlight. She recounts, in a tone that is both voracious and uncanny, the anonymous cruelty of online comments and the impact of gendered violence during the unregulated free-for-all that was the early internet. In ‘Public Solitude,’ real footage of Poh’s 12-year-old self glitches beside her avatar twin, as any certainty surrounding the distinction of the “real” version quickly begins to falter. “I am pixel flesh, code bone, 12 and immortal,” she murmurs as her image dissolves into digital static. The works conjure a strange and uncomfortable intimacy as digital and corporeal selves merge, memory and technology folding into one another.
Charmaine Poh: ‘The Moon is Wet,’ 2025, three-channel digital video installation, 24:29 min // © Charmaine Poh
Passing into the next room feels almost like a submersion. ‘The Moon is Wet,’ a three-channel installation, envelops me in a room that feels distinctly aquatic—spatially, it exists somewhere between an aquarium and the interior of a lighthouse. Three wall-mounted screens form a triangle in the space, making it impossible to watch them all at once. I find myself slowly revolving in an attempt to track the stories of three women as they unfold, my own face illuminated at each turn like a bulb, a mirror, the moon.
Three women narrate their stories: Mazu, the Daoist sea goddess who safeguards sailors; a member of the Ma Jie, a community of migrant women from southern China who served as domestic workers in Singapore; and Monic, a contemporary Indonesian domestic worker speaking of queer love and longing across borders. Voices overlap like tide and undertow; fragments of faces, fabrics and ephemera form a collage that is both seductive and ethereal. Time feels elastic and more than once I have the sense of having just missed something rare and beautiful. Turning always a second too slowly, I’m left grasping at the last glimpse of a train of red lace as it trails out of shot.
Charmaine Poh: ‘Majie, Hands,’ 2016, archival photographic print 73 × 109 cm // © Charmaine Poh
Next, Poh explores the lives of the last remaining Ma Jie. These photographic portraits present a notable contrast with the video works, their lingering stillness honoring a quiet endurance of duty and servitude. A jade bangle glimmers on an elderly wrist, echoing its earlier appearance in the rock pool—a subtle yet poignant refrain that rewards me with thoughts of a bond unspoken, resilience and devotion.
The final chamber shifts to a luminous portrait of queer families in Singapore. Couples cradle children, shell nuts, braid hair. Gestures of domestic ritual pulse quietly against images of mangroves and dappled light. Human and natural worlds interlace to portray a living, breathing ecology of care.
Charmaine Poh: ‘What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world,’ 2024, video still // © Charmaine Poh
In the closing image, two snails inch dreamily across slow, dancing fingers. In their entwining, they become unlikely emblems of queerness—nonconforming, patient, persistent. This feels analogous to the quiet radicalism that threads through the exhibition: feminine as force, queerness as nature, softness as strength.
Throughout ‘Make a travel deep of your inside,’ Poh drifts between myth and memory, technology and tenderness with remarkable grace and poetry. As I cross the final threshold, a parting glance into the rock pool offers a nourishing sense of gratitude and fulfilment. The circle is complete.
PalaisPopulaire
Charmaine Poh: ‘Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take’
Exhibition: Sept. 11, 2025–Feb. 23, 2026
palaispopulaire.db.com/…/charmaine-poh
Unter den Linden 5, 10117 Berlin, click here for map
