by Berlin Art Link // July 14, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Play.
Is art a game? It’s a question that comes up during a conversation with the artist Kasia Fudakowski about the ways in which audiences relate to her works. The notion of a game suggests winners and losers, which sounds more than a bit like the art world we know. But there is a subtle difference between a “game” and “play”—in the latter case, it’s not so clear cut who wins or loses, or if such an outcome is the point. Fudakowski’s wide-ranging artistic practice has often focused on the subtle distinctions, the faultlines in our apparent certainties and the contradictions, absurdities and beauties such fissures create. 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, by definition, reject the finality and hierarchy of games in favor of the ethics of play. We began our exploration of the playful across her works by speaking about her recent collaboration with chef Ayami Awazuhara, ‘Playing House’ (2026), a “culinary gesture” that took place as part of the 80th anniversary celebrations for the Haus am Waldsee.
Ayami Awazuhara and Kasia Fudakowski: ‘Playing House,’ 2026, installation view at Haus am Waldsee // Photo by Ayami Awazuhara
Berlin Art Link: Could you take us into the ‘Playing House’ work? What were the ideas behind it?
Kasia Fudakowski: Ayami was invited by Haus am Waldsee director Anna Gritz to create a special menu of small bites for the museum’s 80th anniversary celebrations, and she in turn invited me to think of a fun way to present them. She’s leaving Berlin in September, moving back to Japan, so it was a fun way for us to collaborate before she goes. I didn’t have much time between this initial chat and presenting an idea to Anna, so I began by drawing the outline of the house and then thought of making it out of thin steel bar, which would be like this wobbly, 80-year-old house, from which we could serve the food.
BAL: Given that it was such a last minute idea, what did you make of the ways in which people reacted to the work once it was up and running?
KF: It was very fun. First of all because the weather was insane! Most of the time we were huddled under an umbrella, then the sun came out and everyone was starving. We were preparing the food behind the structure of the house, before serving it on these little plateaux. We were slowly delivering the food, putting out little rock-like things and sandwiches. My idea was we’d feed people like birds and they’d come and pick it off and then we’d replenish. I made a special multi-layered plateaux-thing to hold single grapes.
The fun thing was that everyone was starving, and if you’d had a normal buffet you’d have had that big rush, but because we had a house-shaped gate between us, everybody stood very calmly and waited. For the first round, we put things on every plateau and nobody touched them, and we were like “come please, you can eat.” That started a chain of very beautiful social situations of people desperate to get these tiny little Japanese jewels of things (like purple Agar Agar jelly made with elderflower syrup), and kids taking all of them, and adults getting angry at kids, or getting kids to get the food for them, two hands reaching for something at the same time, the whole thing wobbling because people were so keen to get them, and people coming around the fence and getting told off. It actually became quite a beautiful social experiment.
Ayami Awazuhara and Kasia Fudakowski: ‘Playing House,’ 2026, installation view at Haus am Waldsee // Photo by Ayami Awazuhara
BAL: It sort of created playground dynamics in a way, it sounds like.
KF: Totally. I think in those situations in an art context, where you have food, the visitors want to first Instagram it and then get that free food. And they know it’s limited, and it’s a bit of a shit-show, but it kind of played out as a dance where everybody was pretending to be their best selves with a thin veil on their hunger. We were in the garden while it poured rain; we really felt like kids in the garden. But we were like the kids who don’t care and just get soaked. It was quite joyful in the end.
Ayami Awazuhara and Kasia Fudakowski: ‘Playing House,’ 2026, installation view at Haus am Waldsee // Photo by Ayami Awazuhara
BAL: Your work often involves rules, sometimes absurd ones. Play involves certain rules in tension with an openness. I wonder how you think about rules in your work: which to include, which to exclude or allow for the breaking of. Would you say you need rules to make things interactive?
KF: I usually work with binaries, but then I offer both options always, so people are making choices. I think that’s the best, easiest and most fun mechanism. There’s a generosity in not deciding either/or and allowing the person to make a decision, which, of course, gives them agency and ownership over the act and gets them engaged, but it also reveals something about themselves much more than it does about the work in question.
I’m working on a book, it’s going to be called ‘Catalogue Reasonné’ and it is a collection of all my ‘Decision Pieces’—which offer reasons to do something or reasons not to do something. When I’ve observed people reading them—say, for example, it’s reasons to have kids or not have kids—they’ll read one, two, three and then they’ll immediately turn to someone and tell them their own reasons. It’s almost like it’s an immediate mechanical reaction, and I think that’s the best possible “result” an artwork can give: here’s an idea, take it and make it your own.
Kasia Fudakowski: ‘In The State Of Decision,’ 2024, installation view at Gaa gallery, New York // Photo by Matthew Sherman
BAL: Many of your works, for example the growing ‘Paravent’ sculpture that has been shown widely, and ‘Die Brucke Der Zwei Wege’ (2025) in Eisenstadt in Austria, create space in some way or other, often rather minimally and semi-permeably but still they could be thought to set up a kind of “ludic geography” in the way a minimal stage does for a play, a site where otherness happens, between reality and between individuals. Could you take us into your thinking about these works and how these material structures can create spaces that are playful?
KF: I think with the ‘Paravent’ structures, they define space by not really defining it. They’re kind of always the in-between thing. With the bridge, I was thinking this will be placed in a garden where people go for walks, the kind that you do with somebody to “take a walk” around the garden. I thought it would be so funny to have a moment where you have to make a decision: left or right, together or not together. The bridge’s design is to have a split in the middle: ultimately, it’s a bridge with a hole in the middle. It creates a moment to define yourself against the other person’s decision, and also see them at a tiny bit more distance. It also allows you to focus down on the reason for the bridge—to get over water—and this hole opens up a frame around that. At some point I was like: “This is genius! Why don’t all bridges have holes in them?”…I’ll tell you why: they’re very hard to construct, and not structurally sound.
I also think of my exhibition ‘Double Standards: A Sexhibition’ (2017), where one had to choose left or right, and once you enter one way, you can’t enter the other. But, of course, you can break the rules, and I just love that it’s like a gift to somebody that they get to say: “ha ha ha! I broke the rules” or “I don’t care about the artist” or “I’m aware of the artist’s wishes and I’m going to follow them because I’m that kind of person.” That also defines the feedback I get. Visitors tend to have a desire to share how and why they made their decision. It personalizes the experience of the artwork, I think.
Kasia Fudakowski: ‘Die Brücke der Zwei Wege,’ 2025 // Photo by Lisa Schulcz
BAL: The concept of play in art can slip into cliché sometimes, rather like the trope of kids playing in their parents’ closet does for fashion: when you run out of ideas, you do that because you can’t be “wrong” when you do it. How do you avoid the easy clichés when building play into a work? Is play a kind of ethic, perhaps, that has its own imperatives?
KF: I actually like to work with clichés because they can set up the frame for a set of expectations, which can then be worked with or against. And I don’t think playfulness necessarily equates to safety.
Playfulness can be very dangerous and unsettling and dark and controlling and weird, and I think it opens up a lot. I, personally, hate to be played with. You have to be one of those people who is super secure in themselves in order to play, and maybe that’s why it kind of works for kids. I think to open up a space of play in an adult situation is much more dark and dangerous than a safe go-to space.
Kasia Fudakowski: ‘Double Standards – A Sexhibition,’ 2017 // Courtesy of the artist and ChertLüdde
BAL: I’m interested in the way play and games are different in terms of this mutuality question. Like, you can win a game, but you can’t necessarily “win” play. One is not inherently teleological like the other. How do you see the distinction between “play” and “games”?
KF: I think maybe this is it: I’m deeply uninterested in games. Saying that, Ayami and I just came up with the idea to make the “artist’s career in Berlin” as a board game.
BAL: Speaking of games you can’t win…
KF: No, you can’t win. You get to the end, the apex, which is the Hamburger Bahnhof or whatever, but then there’s a separate set of cards that says something like: “That’s the end of the game, but it doesn’t mean you’ve won.” And there’s a card you can pick that says: “Did you die 15 years ago? If so, that means your work has increased in value.”
Kasia Fudakowski: ‘Double Standards – A Sexhibition,’ 2017 // Courtesy of the artist and ChertLüdde
BAL: Take us more deeply into the game as it’s developing, if you could.
KF: The serious side of it came from noticing a lot of inequality, the gender “pay” or price gap between male and female artists, for example, especially for women over 40. I think my generation is still a bit shocked to discover that not much has changed, and the stereotype of the female artist being overlooked only to be truly celebrated in her 80s is still alive and well. At some point, though, we decided the real game should just be about money. When you’re not young and sexy and trading on that, you’re trading off your possibilities, which are directly related to how much money you have managed to amass.
BAL: How do you think you’ll get people to engage with the game? Will it be a show or a traditional form of a game, e.g. tabletop?
KF: We started drawing it on a big piece of paper, then a kid (who’s a boy, by the way) peed on it. So we abandoned it. At this stage, it’s just a fun chat with friends, but every artist we’ve talked to has some experience they want to add to the stack of cards, like “you get accepted by the KSK, take 3 steps forward” followed by “you get audited by the KSK, take 3 steps back” or “you get pregnant, sit out the next 10 rounds.”
Kasia Fudakowski: ‘INFO-FUCTION The Second Swipe,’ 2017 // Courtesy of the artist and ChertLüdde
BAL: I think this idea speaks to the wider gamification of society. Through social media, people have been made to compete via discourse: payment for interactions, which has created a space where political identity becomes a form of trolling or “doin’ it for the lolz’” culture. How do you think art can respond in a productive way to this circumstance, where the ludic space has moved from the realm of art into the realm of politics?
KF: While you were talking I was thinking I’m not on any social media and that sometimes the wonderful thing about play can be sitting it out! I never got on Facebook, never got on Instagram, and I sometimes think about what my life would be like if I had. Would I have a more successful career? I mean, probably. But it was so unattractive to me to be involved in all this. There’s a problem, in that on social media you must take a position, which I find so boring and reductive. But, at the same time—and I have to say I haven’t managed to properly articulate this thought—I have this sense that some politicians, like Trump, are actually following the avant-garde artist’s playbook, in this kind of “show me a rule, I’ll show you it isn’t a rule” mindset, this contrarianism. You know: “fuck it, I’ll do what I want! I’m an artist, and I’m not responsible!”
BAL: Jonathan Meese is president now…
KF: It’s allowed in the art world because I think art provides a space to test ideas out, where failure can be as valuable as success, but it gets really dangerous when there is real power involved.
