by Olivia Noss // Jan. 9, 2026
Moyra Davey’s first major survey in Germany traces a multimedia artistic practice rooted in repetition and referential modes of creation. Currently on view at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), the exhibition showcases over 30 years of the artist’s oeuvre, featuring lens-based media in both analog and digital forms. Drawing from her own life as well as from personal research, Davey’s work interplays text and image—her distinct voiceover narration providing compelling deliberations about grief, sexuality and survival.
Moyra Davey: ‘EM Copperheads 151–210, J.L. + R.B.G.,’ n.b.k., 1990–2025, 60 pigment prints, tape, postage, ink, exhibition view Moyra Davey, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), 2025 // © Photo by n.b.k. / Jens Ziehe
One of the first pieces one encounters upon entering the exhibition is a collection of printed macro shots of US one cent coins. Sequenced on the wall in grid formation, they depict the early US president Abraham Lincoln’s profile. Upon closer observation, the pieces, together titled, ‘EM Copperheads, 151-210,’ reveal postage markings such as stamps and addresses. These physical traces demonstrate the journey each piece has undergone on its way to art institutions where they were set to be shown. A rich, saturated, patina forms across each coin, bearing the weight of time’s passing and granting each piece a readymade quality. Davey began this project in 1990 during a major rise in global capitalism, one which could be largely attributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as the end of the Cold War. Both of these events, alongside a paucity of Davey’s own personal funds, brought money to the forefront when it came to thinking about art production and the networks that come with it.
Moyra Davey: ‘Hell Notes,’ 1990/2017, Super-8-film transferred to HD, color, sound; ‘EM Copperheads 151–210, J.L. + R.B.G.,’ n.b.k., 1990–2025, 60 pigment prints, tape, postage, ink, exhibition view Moyra Davey, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), 2025 // © Photo by n.b.k. / Jens Ziehe
In front of this piece sits a television with a digitized Super8 streaming of ‘Hell Notes,’ one of Davey’s films, begun in 1990 and continued into 2017. In the film’s early stages, Davey explores Freud’s concept of the unconscious symbolic equation between money and feces. The video provides a textural portrait of the city of New York, while exploring Freud’s theory of money as a symbolic substance that may be ingested and excreted. Davey delves into the inner workings of the Federal Reserve, focusing on global transactions via bars of gold stored underground in the city’s financial district. Her own voiceover narration throughout this film becomes a characteristic feature of future video pieces to come.
Chromogenic prints trail the perimeter of n.b.k.’s space, displaying what Davey refers to as hi-fi paraphernalia: recording devices and electric cables collected on high shelves to be kept out of reach from her newly-born son. These items, in the artist’s mind, are physical evidence of the building of a home, an indicator of human tendencies to nest and collect.
Moyra Davey: ‘Elastic,’ 1998; ‘Disposable,’ 1999; ‘Deoxit,’ 1999; ‘Tone Arms,’ 1999; ‘Pilon,’ 1999; ‘Just Men,’ 1994, pigment prints, exhibition view ‘Moyra Davey,’ Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), 2025 // © Photo: n.b.k. / Jens Ziehe
The following room reveals a similar propensity by the artist to capture material goods and consider what they reflect through the spaces they inhabit. Davey dedicated a significant portion of her artistic practice to documenting newspaper stands around Manhattan. Her series ‘Newsstands,’ made during the first half of the 1990s, offers a unique documentation of structures now largely extinct across the city. Her typological approach to capturing this subject matter could be compared to works within the New Objectivity movement in the lineage of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The pieces are installed in a serial order, which bring attention to the varied details within each work: hand painted signs, heaping piles of newspapers and magazines, candy and cigarettes, along with each stand’s surrounding architecture. In a similar way, the amalgamation of everyday items seem to overflow within a contained space and reflect vital signs of life.
Moyra Davey: ‘Newsstand #9,’ 1994 // Courtesy of Moyra Davey
Her film shown in the exhibition, titled ‘Forks & Spoons’ (2024), meditates on the works of five different women and queer photographers: Francesca Woodman, Shala Miller, Justine Kurland, Alix Cleo Roubaud and Carla Williams. Davey creates femmages—tributes to each artist, paid by recreating images within their archives through self portraiture. The conjoining thread through each of these practices is the depiction of women’s bodies—how they are conventionally represented and how such associations might be subverted. In doing so, the images become entry points into understanding broader concepts of family, self-definition, grief, sexuality and the passage of time. Broken into categories by artist, the works see Davey insert herself sporadically into the frame, pacing in the forest where it is presumed several of these images were made. Davey considers the making of the photographs as reenactments, using the body a form for reflection, as material for thought. In her process, she writes her insights preemptively, recording them, listening to the playback and repeating her words before a camera. This layered process imbues her reflections with a meditative tone, bearing the slow, hypnotic effect of an incantation.
Moyra Davey: ‘Image expressed by the action of light,’ 2024, pigment print // Courtesy of Moyra Davey
The final room of the show presents a series from ‘Shabbiness of Beauty,’ in which Davey creates a collection of images in dialogue with the archive of late photographer Peter Hujar. Drawing from similar subject matter, Davey portrays quiet moments of everyday life: the faces of horses in fields covered with flies, dogs sitting silently in natural light and young men near windowsills looking curiously towards her lens. Without Hujar’s work present, these photographs could be considered a contemplative exercise in transience—vanitas photographs, as Davey has referred to many of her other pieces. Rather than a memento mori, one could assert that these images, among those in her practice thus far, possess its inverse, memento vivere—a subtle reminder of life and its fleeting pleasures.
Exhibition Info
n.b.k.
‘Moyra Davey’
Exhibition: Dec. 6, 2025-Feb. 8, 2026
nbk.org
Chausseestraße 128-129, 10115 Berlin, click here for map
