by Faye Campbell // Jan. 19, 2026
I first came in contact with David Horvitz’s practice through his 2021 book ‘Nostalgia,’ which I have proceeded to wrap in newspaper and then unpack and place on my bedside table over the course of three moves, one intercontinental. Composed of descriptions of deleted images from his photo archive, it’s less about the content and more of an evocation; a statement of a sunrise or an “egg drop soup in a bowl like a photograph of the sun,” rather than the photograph of undulating pinks and blues or a yolk, pastel yellow and suspended in a steaming bowl.
David Horvitz: ‘At the limits of the city,’ 2025, installation view at ChertLüdde, Berlin // Photo by Giorgia Palmisano MBP
In ChertLüdde, evocations abound: the show is a transcription of California (I’ve never been, but I imagine it to be sun drenched and a bit dehydrated), which is transposed onto the grid of the gallery in Schöneberg. Shells, dried stalks, bits of pottery, sea urchins, art left behind by visitors, are arranged on a stage (a duplication of the one found in Horvitz’s garden in Los Angeles), which is activated through readings by Berlin-based writers Susan Finlay and Erin Honeycutt (along the theoretical through-line of LA-as-Berlin-as-LA and connectivity, a method to engage locality and collective exchange). A dried palm branch leans in the corner.
David Horvitz: ‘At the limits of the city,’ 2025, installation view at ChertLüdde, Berlin // Photo by Giorgia Palmisano MBP
Mirrors line the edges of the walls, akin to those found in Horvitz’s LA garden, implicating our shoes and ankles in the installation, and if we crouch to look closer, the whole of us, face and all. The mirrors could be read as a portal, in a certain way, to Los Angeles and vice versa. Just as those who walk by the perimeter of the garden in Southern California are reflected in these mirrors, so are we, as we circumnavigate the exhibition. This mirror action reverberates as a commonality, a shared experience despite thousands of kilometers, the divide of the Atlantic Ocean, social and political differences and all the other things that separate two countries, two continents.
David Horvitz: ‘At the limits of the city,’ 2025, installation view at ChertLüdde, Berlin // Photo by Giorgia Palmisano MBP
Los Angeles itself is similarly brought into the space through the considered placement of Horvitz’s eponymous work, ‘At The Limits of the City.’ Four black-and-white photographs are installed in cardinal directions in ChertLüdde. Horvitz is depicted in the images, his back to us as he gazes beyond the horizon of the northernmost, southernmost, easternmost and westernmost limits of Los Angeles, his figure silhouetted by the broad streets and concrete buildings of the city, mapping the limits and the geographic delineation within the gallery space. The project began in San Pedro, where Horvitz grew up, which was formerly a bustling port and a home to many Japanese-American fishermen, and is now next to a federal prison used by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The work gestures towards various theorists from urban studies (see Mike Davis, for instance) and Horvitz here emphasizes how LA’s borders are produced and maintained, often privileging those far removed from the area itself, and how the boundaries are often constructed to generate structures of inequality, of harm.
David Horvitz: ‘At the limits of the city,’ 2025, installation view at ChertLüdde, Berlin // Photo by Giorgia Palmisano MBP
Conceptually, this idea of borders—in this case their delineation and disintegration—is also traced through the space via chimes that hang from the ceiling. Visitors are invited to animate them, triggering a twinkling chorus that plays a regional German lullaby; it is a transgression of and also a melding of boundaries, between night and day, waking and dreaming. In Horvitz’s words, this dissolution of imagined boundaries is a moment of transition, “when one can disappear from sight, disappear from the daylight as dusk happens.” The sound is further layered with readings of poems that play at regular intervals, weaving in Berlin once more.
David Horvitz: ‘At the limits of the city,’ 2025, installation view at ChertLüdde, Berlin // Photo by Giorgia Palmisano MBP
Today, the question of borders—of boundaries between the public and the private, state and individual—is ever more present in the mind. The opening work, titled ‘Other People’ (2022), is a collection of 310 portraits, digitally collected via facial recognition software that was programmed to search for Horvitz’s name. As these faces surround us, at once strange but also familiar, we are reminded of the sometimes uncanny connection to those outside of ourselves and the lapsing boundaries between us and them—as Horvitz here interrogates the often slippery ethics of image databases, frequently collected without knowledge or consent of the subject and sold to law enforcement or monitored by the state.
David Horvitz: ‘At the limits of the city,’ 2025, installation view at ChertLüdde, Berlin // Photo by Giorgia Palmisano MBP
One of the final works in the exhibition is a scrawled neon sign that reads “every small flutter.” Taken from a letter written by Dr. Noor Abdalla, whose husband Mahmoud Khalil was abducted by ICE in 2025 while she was expecting their first child, the sentence is separated from its original context and instead metamorphizes into what Horvitz describes as a butterfly in a garden, “whose effect is small and delicate, yet capable of rippling outward.” Words are powerful, words have movement, words cross continents, sneak past, undermine, build and break boundaries, they create collectivity and new action despite thresholds—words reach people.
Exhibition Info
ChertLüdde
David Horvitz: ‘At the limits of the city’
Exhibition: Nov. 22, 2025-Feb. 7, 2026
chertluedde.com
Hauptstraße 18, 10827 Berlin, click here for map
