by Carolina Sculti // Apr. 28, 2026
Adam Pendleton’s exhibition ‘Can I Be?,’ currently on view at the Langen Foundation, brings together painting, drawing, sculpture and video in a spatially driven exploration of abstraction, language and history. Central to Pendleton’s practice is his concept of “Black Dada,” first articulated in his 2008 manifesto, which proposes a framework for thinking through the relationship between Blackness, abstraction and the historical avant-garde.
The exhibition is set within the Langen Foundation, a museum built on a former NATO missile base near Neuss and designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Characterized by a synthesis of Japanese architectural tradition and modernism, Ando’s use of concrete, light and site-specificity shapes the conditions under which Pendleton’s work is encountered. In this setting, Pendleton foregrounds “Black Dada” across image, text and space, using abstraction to fragment and reconfigure forms, situating meaning as relational rather than fixed.
Adam Pendleton: ‘Can I Be?,’ Langen Foundation, Neuss // Photo by Roman März
Carolina Sculti: Your ‘Black Dada manifesto’ has been foundational to your work. Could you share how you came to write it and how your relationship to it has evolved over the years?
Adam Pendleton: I wrote the Black Dada manifesto in 2008 as a way to give language to a set of intuitions that were already structuring my work. It was less a declaration than a proposition—a way to conflate Blackness and abstraction, to propose a relationship between the two as mutually generative forces.
To date, it remains a point of orientation, but not a limit. It is a concept that, both theoretically and formally, allows for movement, for contradiction, for hope.
CS: You open your show at Langen Foundation with a monumental black pavilion containing your video work ‘Toy Soldier’–can you talk about the decision to open with this work and what drew you to the Robert E. Lee Monument as a site to consider and breakdown (literally) in the video?
AP: The decision to open with ‘Toy Soldier (Notes on Robert E. Lee, Richmond, Virginia/Strobe)’ was about establishing a threshold—both spatial and psychological. The pavilion creates a condition of entry, a kind of pause, before the viewer moves into the rest of the exhibition.
The Robert E. Lee monument is a site where history becomes material—where ideology is given form. In the video, I wanted to confront and destabilize that form. The work does not resolve the monument; it breaks it down through light, sound and time, allowing it to be seen differently and tracing how its capacity as a symbol has shifted over time.
Adam Pendleton: ‘Toy Soldier (Notes on Robert E. Lee, Richmond, Virginia/Strobe),’ 2021–22, installation view ‘Can I Be?,’ Langen Foundation, Neuss // Photo by Roman März
CS: Can you tell us about how your work interacts with Tadao Ando’s architecture at the Langen Foundation? What role does scale play in this show and what works have you selected to address different scales that are at work?
AP: Tadao Ando’s architecture is precise, but it is also porous—light, proportion and movement are always in play. The work enters into that system rather than opposing it.
Scale is central to this dialogue. There are moments of compression—drawings that ask for close looking—and moments of expansion, where painting or video meets the body directly. The exhibition moves between these registers, allowing scale to function as a way of thinking, not just a physical condition.
CS: What is the meaning of the title ‘Can I Be?’ for you and how does it relate to the ways in which different architectures and forms can hold being and remembrance within themselves?
AP: The title is both a question and a structure. It suggests an articulation of becoming that is not fixed in advance.
Across the exhibition, different architectures—of space, of language, of form—hold and shape that question. They do not answer it. Instead, they create conditions where being and remembrance can emerge as something provisional, constructed in relation to what surrounds us.
Adam Pendleton: ‘Can I Be?,’ Langen Foundation, Neuss // Photo by Roman März
CS: Dada and Black Dada challenge conventional sense-making. How do you guide viewers to engage with your work without feeling the need to extract a single meaning?
AP: I don’t think of the work as requiring a single meaning. It’s more about establishing a field of relations—between gesture and structure, history and perception. The viewer is not asked to decode the work, but to spend time with it. Meaning, if it emerges, takes shape over time. The work resists closure—it remains open.
Exhibition Info
Langen Foundation
Adam Pendleton: ‘Can I Be?’
Exhibition: Apr. 19–Sept. 2026
langenfoundation.de
Raketenstation Hombroich 1, 41472 Neuss, click here for map
