by Alison Hugill // July 10, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Play.
From the perspective of non-artists, nearly all artistic pursuits might seem like opportunities to be playful. Creativity in its essence is about thinking beyond rational constraints and introducing novel elements that prompt us to re-engage with our surroundings and ordinary ways of being.
From Dada and Fluxus to contemporary relational practices, playfulness has informed approaches to art-making in the form of objects, happenings, performances and, more literally, as interactive digital and analog games or LARPs. The 2024 exhibition ‘Radical Playgrounds,’ held on the grounds of Gropius Bau, tackled the concept of “radical play” through its many installations and pavilions, which “use[d] playground vocabulary, be it a swing, a water fountain, a carousel or a labyrinth, to reveal what [was] left unspoken: histories of inclusion and exclusion, engaging activism through the medium of play…” Radical play, which treats play and games as political and transformative tools for resisting traditional systems, was harnessed here to encourage visitors to step outside normative relationships to museums and their established forms of legibility.
Within more traditional art-viewing spaces, some artists manage to enact playfulness through their work by rewriting the museum’s codes and scripts and making room for participatory action: Erwin Wurm, for example, is known for his ludic sculptures, alongside which he invites visitors to follow loose instructions whereby their bodies become part of the display. Some practices, like that of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, use video games and their aesthetics to address political issues head-on, while others—like Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa’s ‘Black Power Naps‘—encourage a form of “rebellious leisure,” using play as a tool for disrupting spaces of racialized capitalist production, especially art institutions.
Kasia Fudakowski: ‘Die Brücke der Zwei Wege,’ 2025 // Photo by Rainer Schoditsch
For our second iteration of this topic, we will look at artistic and curatorial practices that not only use games and toys as materials but also approach their subject matter, however serious, with a certain playful openness and imagination. We begin with an interview with Berlin-based artist Kasia Fudakowski, whose practice engages with absurdity, reframing everyday rules and structures as blueprints to be questioned and reinvented. As William Kherbek writes: “Fudakowski’s works often invite audiences into spaces of play, relationships defined by arbitrary rules or locations disrupted in comic and perhaps unsettling ways. Hers are works that often, by definition, reject the finality and hierarchy of games in favor of the ethics of play.”
In another contribution, Lars Holdgate reviews Umut Azad Akkel’s current exhibition ‘Holding My Drink in the Corner’ at Haus am Lützowplatz. Considering the scaffolding sculpture ‘The Path,’ displayed outside the gallery, Holdgate thinks through the rules that guide behavior and the role of the labyrinth in spaces of play, as a type of game that can turn dark, leading to a sense of loneliness or exclusion. Examining the sinister parallels of competition and rejection that both games and societies rely on, he looks at the works in the exhibition as a metaphor for how we play out reality, especially within contexts of migration and queerness.
Umut Azad Akkel: ‘The Path,’ 2021/26, Lützowplatz, im Kontext der Ausstellung, ‘Holding My Drink in the Corner,’ kuratiert von Ozan Ünlükoç, im Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin // Copyright Umut Azad Akkel, photo by Göran Gnaudschun
Olivia Noss will interview American actor and ventriloquist Sophie Becker, who recently performed with her dummy, Ronnie, at the Haus am Waldsee summer party. As Becker puts it, Ronnie represents “the New York girl who is my id”—the unconscious part of her psyche. With her performances, Becker revives a Vaudevillian trope, breathing new life into this lost art and finding renewed institutional legitimacy for circus-adjacent, playful performative modes.
Meanwhile, Juan José Santos Mateo speaks to Peruvian artist Andrea Canepa about her two recent exhibitions that continue to engage with concepts of play, nearly a decade after her show ‘Margen de juego’ (2017) at the Galería Rosa Santos, where Canepa transformed the art space into a game board for bodily experience governed by pre-established rules (informed by research into the theories of Montessori, Pestalozzi and Rudolf Laban, among others). In her works, she considers systems of visual, spatial and symbolic organization and harnesses within them the room for nonsense and bewilderment, opening the door to the unpredictable.
Andrea Canepa: ‘Until it lives in the muscle,’ 2017, video still // Courtesy of the artist
With these contributions and more, play is considered as both the form and guiding method of the artists’ works, where absurdity, fun and impromptu, collective problem-solving are privileged over rigid aesthetic outcomes and predictable art-viewing experiences.
