by Josefin Granetoft // Nov. 21, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Ghosts.
The title of Ligia Lewis’ exhibition at Gropius Bau sounds like a drawn-out roar: ‘I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…’ Equally defiant and weary, performative and paradoxical, it captures several registers that run through the exhibition. Working across sound, video and performance, Lewis moves fluidly between the stage and the exhibition space—between bodies that are physically present and ones that appear only as traces.
Ligia Lewis: ‘study now steady,’ Live installation view, ‘Ligia Lewis: I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…,’ Gropius Bau, 2025 // © Gropius Bau, photo by Rosa Merk
Opening the exhibition is the monumental projection of ‘A Plot, A Scandal’ (2023), which traces histories of racial violence and resistance across the Caribbean region. Adapted, like most pieces on view, from an earlier stage production, the video features Lewis alongside performer Corey Scott-Gilbert. In a particularly striking scene, the two tumble through a pastoral landscape, play-fighting and chasing each other in 17th-century style wigs and lavish, lilac costumes. These images sit against a voiceover that recites legal articles tied to historical systems of enslavement, contrasting playfulness and extreme violence. As the exhibition leaflet notes, the work departs from a number of historical figures and their legacies—from British 17th century philosopher John Locke, whose doctrine on man’s natural rights coexisted with the trade in enslaved people; to Caribbean figures of resistance such as Maria Olofa (Wolofa) and José Aponte, linked to anti-colonial uprisings across the 16th and 19th centuries.
Surpassing a linear chronology or a distinct narrative, Lewis creates instead a long, overlapping and messy constellation of histories, moved by the bodies on the screen. The piece aptly articulates the idea that histories of racial violence inscribe themselves on the body—through lived experience and across generations—a concern central to Lewis’s practice. Her work reckons with these inherited conditions, bringing to light histories that remain marginal or actively suppressed. Yet, as Lewis has noted in interviews, her interest lies not only in excavating the past but, perhaps more so, in attending to its absences: the gaps, erasures, and “ghosts” of history. “Some stories are hard to tell,” she remarks in the video’s voiceover, “Lucky for us, ghosts don’t die so easily,” hinting at the way these severed or silenced histories continue to haunt the present.
The following room is almost entirely dark, save for an occasionally blinking spotlight. Stepping inside, I have to pause to orient myself, reaching my hands forward to make sure I don’t bump into something. But the space is empty, animated by a sonic landscape of disembodied voices: speaking, whispering or calling out from the speakers placed alongside the walls and corners of the room. At times, the voices are whispering so softly I feel urged to come closer, placing my ear against the speakers—at other times I need to step back as they rise to a loud chorus. Some of the spoken text is reciting the Brothers Grimm’s 19th century tale ‘The Willful Child,’ which tells the horrifying story of a child whose refusal to obey her mother leads to her death, after which she continues to haunt and disturb her grave.
Titled ‘Water Will (in Melody)’ (2018/2025), the sound and light installation is adapted from a stage performance with the same title. In the absence of physical bodies, Lewis nonetheless creates a sense of presence and movement within the space, carried by the choir of voices. Here, absence becomes generative, as I read it, through a withdrawal of the body from the violence of representation. In an earlier stage piece, ‘minor matter’ (2016), Lewis asked whether the black box could become an experiential space for Blackness beyond identity politics. In ‘Water Will (in Melody)’, she appears to pursue this question further by refusing the spectacularization of Black presence. The empty black box becomes a site of negation rather than display, where Lewis confronts the audience with presences that cannot be possessed or fully known.
Further into the exhibition, a group of performers occupies an otherwise empty space for three hours nearly every day of its duration. When I enter, the performance, titled ‘steady now study’ (2023), is already underway: three performers dressed casually in sweatpants and T-shirts are bent forward, their arms reaching toward the floor. At first the movements are minimal—a trembling hand, a sudden jolt of an arm—before the performers drop to all fours, dragging themselves forward with visible effort and occasionally collapsing. As the choreography progresses, the performers’ pace intensifies; they move across the room and at times make contact with audience members, squeezing onto the benches where visitors sit or extending a hand towards us. Lewis frames the work as an ongoing study, and it indeed feels less like a fixed choreography than a set of conditions, phrases and constellations that reconfigure with each iteration. Though more abstract than the other works on view, it nevertheless resonates with Lewis’s broader concerns: the performers’ negotiation of space, the relation between their bodies and ours and the dynamics of seeing and being seen.
Ligia Lewis: ‘study now steady,’ Live installation view, ‘Ligia Lewis: I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…,’ Gropius Bau, 2025 // © Gropius Bau, photo by Rosa Merk
The exhibition closes with ‘deader than dead’ (2020), a video that reads more like a straightforward performance documentation. Four performers, including Lewis, move between synchrony and collapse, repeatedly dropping to the floor in staged “deaths” that resemble the staggering movements in the previous live act. The work riffs on the morbid connotation in theatrical terms like “deadpan”—humor delivered without expression—and “corpsing”—an actor’s break from character. Compared to the other pieces, the translation from live performance to video feels less transformative and its impact more muted. Yet it raises a separate question that, on a formal level, underpins the entire exhibition: what happens to live performance when it is fixed within the exhibition space?
Across the exhibition, Lewis offers several responses to this query. She aligns performance, in her words, with “a political act; a writing against racist forms of erasure and misrecognition.” What emerges is a sustained inquiry into how histories marked by violence continue to move through bodies, voices and spaces—shifting between visibility and withdrawal, presence and absence.
Gropius Bau
Ligia Lewis: ‘I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…’
Exhibition: Oct. 16, 2025–Jan. 18, 2026
gropiusbau.de
Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, click here for map
