Galleries

HackelBury presents Ian McKeever: Seven Stones, an exhibition of photographs taken at the Neolithic Henge Monument in Avebury, Wiltshire.

Made in 2017 using a medium-format analogue camera and printed in 2025, these works reflect McKeever’s fascination with the physical presence of the stones; their mass and heft and the sense of time and permanence which they embody.

Seven Stones forms part of McKeever’s philosophical exploration and long-standing dialogue and symbiotic relationship between painting and photography, presence and absence, time and materiality.

“It’s the gap between an image and its presence that intrigues me”. IM

Rather than depicting the Avebury stone circle as landscape or monument, McKeever focuses on the presence of the stones: their physical mass, indomitable endurance, and radically non-human sense of time. The photographs do not attempt to encompass the site as a whole. Instead, McKeever moves close to the stones, cropping tightly, circling them and allowing their weight and density to assert themselves within the frame.

The photographs Seven Stones emerge directly from McKeever’s painting practice. Known primarily for his abstract paintings, McKeever frequently turns to photography not as a preparatory tool, but as a “reality check”: a way of affirming the world of sensation that his paintings pursue in more elusive, amorphous forms. While his paintings allow presence to remain latent and indeterminate, photography pins it down to a recognisable object. However, also recognising that a photograph as such is itself an abstraction, as is the painting. This gap between an object and an implied presence McKeever explored in his monumental painting series Henge Paintings 2017 – 2022.

“It is through the photograph that I have come to know myself and through the painting I have come to be myself”. IM

The tension between the fixity and certainty of the photographic image and the open-ended temporality of painting is central to McKeever’s work. A photograph holds a single, emphatically fixed moment in time, while a painting evolves across months or years, resisting completion and refusing to belong to either a single point in time or a single viewpoint.

Ian McKeever: Seven Stones invites viewers into a quiet but profound encounter with the stones as presences rather than images, asking how we register the world physically and sensorially and how art mediates between what is seen, what is felt, and what endures across time.

About Ian McKeever

Ian McKeever (British, b. 1946) emerged as an artist in the early 1970’s out of an interest in both conceptualism and abstract painting, the prevalent trends at the time. Although seeing himself primarily as a painter, this is informed by his ongoing engagement with photography. Not in the blurring of the boundary between the two disciplines, rather in seeing and understanding them as distinct visual languages.

McKeever received the DAAD scholarship in 1989 and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1990. He has exhibited internationally and has taught extensively in the UK, Germany, and the USA including Guest Professor at the Städel Akademie der Kunst in Frankfurt, Senior Lecturer, Slade, University of London and Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton.

Ian McKeever was elected a Royal Academician in 2003 and his work is represented in leading international public Collections, including Tate, British Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Museum of Fine Art, Budapest; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Art and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.

About HackelBury Fine Art

HackelBury was founded twenty-seven years ago by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel. The gallery is committed to championing artists working with the visual arts who push the boundaries of their medium to create meaningful and contemplative work.

The London based gallery initially showcased classic photography from the 20th century including Henri Cartier- Bresson, Berenice Abbott, Malick Sidibe, and Sebastião Salgado. The transition from traditional photography to more conceptual work was as intuitive as it was organic, beginning with artists such as William Klein, Pascal Kern, Doug and Mike Starn, Garry Fabian Miller, Katja Liebmann, Ian McKeever, Stephen Inggs and Bill Armstrong.

In recent years the gallery has taken on emerging artists such as Oli Kellett, Nadezda Nikolova, Alys Tomlinson, Coral Woodbury and Sharon Walters.

Each artist, whether emerging or established, creates work defined by a depth of thought and breadth and consistency of approach. The small group of artists with whom HackelBury work, represent a diversity of practice yet share an artistic integrity which the gallery is fully committed to supporting in the long term.

NOTES TO EDITORS

In May this year the Royal Academy will publish a book of the selected writings on art by Ian McKeever covering the period 1978 – 2025. The publication will have entries ranging from his travel journals to such places as Papua New Guinea and Greenland alongside essays on such artists as Piero della Francesca, Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Mitchell. This will be illustrated with a selection of sketchbook pages and photographs drawn from the artist’s travels and studio.

The Painting That Inhabits: Gerard Waskievitz

Exhibition review: Alles Farbe, bleibtreudrei Raum für Kunst, Bleibtreustraße 3, Charlottenburg, Berlin. March 13 – April 13, 2026. Part of Charlottenwalk 2026.

I walked into bleibtreudrei Raum für Kunst and the paint arrived before I did. The weight before the form, the carnality of the surface before any possible reading. The works of Gerard Waskievitz reach the body before they reach thought.

Gerard Waskievitz was born in Poland in 1962, studied at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Essen, and lives and works in Berlin. He paints in oil and egg tempera, and uses pentimento as method: layers accumulate, earlier sketches bleed through the final surface, and what the paint conceals remains visible beneath, pressing from within.

In times dominated by artificial intelligence and images that are consumed before they are seen, Waskievitz moves in the opposite direction, and it is precisely in this tension that the strength of his work lies. To choose painting today, to choose the body, the gesture, the slow accumulation of pigment on canvas, is a position. This insistence on what has weight, on what demands presence, in an era when the image has become surface without reverse, circulation without friction, contact without contact.

The large-scale works settle into the space with an immediate physical presence. The figures are close to life-size, and what happens between them and whoever sees them resists any analysis prepared in advance. What you find is not entirely legible. Faces remain unresolved, figures inhabit situations the painting deliberately leaves unnamed, backgrounds oscillate between exterior landscape and interior state without settling into either. Waskievitz devoured the post-World War I painters, and what pulses in the canvases are the fragmented figures and group compositions where bodies share a space that does not make them proximate, each sealed in a solitude that physical nearness cannot dissolve. The pressure lives in the paint itself, in the density of pigment, in the drips that record the time of the gesture, and also in the distortion of forms, which strains like something yielding under a weight that does not announce itself.

Those who know the history of painting will recognize that Waskievitz devoured much more than a generation. What pulses in the canvases is made of layers that span centuries. The light that emerges from dark matter rather than falling upon it, the pigment that exists as weight before it exists as color, the figures that inhabit shadow as much as visibility, this is the seventeenth century working from inside, Rembrandt and Velázquez digested, their erosions and disappearances still active beneath the surface. Then the nineteenth century: figures that escape the scene containing them, present and ungraspable, looking out from inside a space the narrative cannot close over them, bodies in landscapes that offer no consolation, no geometry of refuge. Manet and Cézanne, swallowed whole. And over all of it, the weight of a century of wars, the solitude of figures that share space without touching, an atmosphere that does not announce its origins but presses from within.

Of all the works in Alles Farbe, it was Tiger in der Landschaft (2025) that did not let me leave. A figure stands at the center, wearing a leopard-print coat, sneakers, fully of now, surrounded by a garden that belongs to no time at all. Mythical creatures dissolve into vegetation, trees bleed into sky, flowers press forward with a carnality that the figure absorbs without reacting. And the face, as in all of Waskievitz’s work, is not there. Not erased. Simply never arrived. This figure exists through its clothes, its stance, the impossible world that has grown around it. It was this painting that made the studio visit necessary.

In the studio, the smaller landscapes stay on the walls around the large canvases, as if the painting could not fit inside the formats, as if the gesture continued past the edge, infecting the space, making the entire studio a surface in process. The more contained portraits, precise and luminous, reveal the full range of Waskievitz’s command: every incompletion in the large canvases is a decision sustained by a hand that knows what it is opening. What moves that hand separates the image from its explanation, opens gaps and interruptions. Color acts as its own language, modulating intensity and meaning without recourse to description. The ochre-yellow that runs through distinct series is an emotional frequency, the color of light in Flemish interiors, of desacralized medieval gold, of southern sun filtered through northern memory. Blue appears always in tension with that yellow, as antagonist: the other time, the shadow, what endures beneath the warmth. Paint and surface carry the weight of a long history without bowing to it, and it is in that refusal of reverence that each work finds its carnality.

The real in these works is never fully actualized, and it is in the faces that this becomes unbearable. The face is where we expect the subject, where identity fixes itself, where the other calls us. In Waskievitz the face is there but does not surrender. It is not erasure, not absence. It is a presence that refuses fixation, a figure that exists as force before it exists as person. The female figures carry this condition with particular intensity: present and ungraspable, they look out from inside a space the painting’s narrative cannot close over them, inhabiting the canvas as a site of refusal rather than representation. What pulses in these faceless faces is exactly what Deleuze would call the virtual, not what is missing, but what exceeds what is visible, what the paint holds at the surface without letting actualize. The thickness of the pigment, the form that interrupts itself before completing, the eyes that do not look back because they have not yet fully arrived, all of it sustains the painting open, in process even after it is finished, carrying a humanity that does not allow itself to be named.

Waskievitz paints space as time. Space and time as a single condition: a field where every gesture accumulates, where earlier layers press through the surface, where the figure painted yesterday bleeds into the figure being painted today. To stand before these canvases is to stand inside something that thickens rather than passes. The paint is this thickness, made visible, made carnal, made pressurized. The body in the painting and the body in front of it share the same condition: both made of everything that came before, both in the middle of something still unfinished. It is precisely this temporal density that makes Waskievitz’s painting political in the deepest sense: structurally resistant to the logic of the disposable.

The German Expressionists painted in a world in ruins, after a war that showed what humanity is capable of. Since 2015 we have been living its return, the far right advancing, wars, bodies counted with indifference, fear settled into the daily life of those who make art, who think, who still believe that painting is a political act. Waskievitz looks at this world and makes others in the imagination, and returns with a painting that inhabits chaos, moves through it, and in that slow and carnal time of paint on canvas, creates another world, unreal and absolutely present.

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Curator: Shane Bradford
Dates: 2 May – 30 May, 2026

The art of joy as an act of resistance

Ancient philosophies of happiness, commonly (mis)translated as the state of eudaimonia, offer various pathways to personal contentedness, such as hedonism, stoicism, and epicureanism. Fast forward to the extreme now*, and a pure form of happiness proves a slippery conception, alluding even our best attempts at a common consensus.

Subjective experience and faith in the righteous path aside, we are left with a general feeling that happiness is real without really knowing how, or when, we’ve attained it. In The Global West, the commoditisation of happiness renders its fulfilment precariously in line with base rate inflation, and the broadening wealth gap. Confusion reigns, for without the exigence of discontent, what remedies can we sell?

Amidst this backdrop of pervasive Endcore* and the scarcity of optimism as a cultural resource, a personal state of happiness becomes a contrary force, like an act of resistance. State and late Capitalism, arguably once a means to life improvement, have shifted primary output from consumer goods to the production of fear. The presence of fear is a key catalyst of need, need a driver of desire, and desire the main force behind sales.

Art, at its best, has always served as a counterpoint to egomaniacal assumptions of permanence by every societal powerbroker from Nero to Napoleon. Thus, Radical Happiness speculates on how three exemplary early to-mid career painters enact resistance within the framework of painting, harnessing joy as opposition, and conjuring battlements of radical happiness against the prevailing politics of horror.

*Shumon Basar / Flash Art, #341, 2022

Billy Crosby engages with traditional Western tropes of the ‘pastoral’ in his work, as well as flirting with kawaii, the Japanese penchant for cuteness that has its furry little roots in shyness and vulnerability. Working across painting, as well as blockchain-based digital formats, Crosby transcends the mainstream popular discourse on AI, delivering an alternative aesthetic interpretation of technology’s more optimistic potential. Crosby held his first London solo show, entitled ‘The Meadow’ at Union in October, 2025.

Bunny Hennessey approaches the painted canvas as a site of heightened, embodied expression. Her work begins with first impulses of making, allowing sensation to be moved and held across the surface. Her paintings conjure a synaesthesia, where colour, gesture and texture register as overlapping sensory experiences. The notion of happiness, in Bunny’s hands, traces a weightless route to the stars whilst remaining grounded by her distinctly saturated and deliberately discordant colouration.

Isaac Andrews is a painter of touch, focusing on the poignant but fleeting moments in which human beings breach the social boundaries of intimacy and meaningfully connect with one another. Pleasure is profound, and the ability to isolate and savour life’s more caring acts runs contrary to the prevailing tide of cynical individualism. A bunch of flowers, a warm hug, these are the quotidian micro-events that forge a pathway to the universal experience of humanity. Isaac Andrews deftly singles out positive moments of personal connection as a counterpoint to global negativity.

Website: http://www.uniongallery.com

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The Pavilion of Ecuador at Biennale Arte 2026 presents Tawna & Oscar, an exhibition that challenges dominant ways of organizing life, knowledge, and territory. Featuring the Tawna collective and Oscar Santillán, and curated by Manuela Moscoso with the support of its commissioner, the Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art of Ecuador (MAAC), the project approaches art as a practice of attention.

Tawna & Oscar brings together the practices of Oscar Santillán and the Tawna collective to present two contemporary ways of thinking and making the world through relation. The project proposes an approach to art that moves away from fixed categories and closed hierarchies, focusing instead on processes of exchange that unfold across bodies, languages, territories, and times.

Curated by Manuela Moscoso, the Pavilion of Ecuador is conceived as a space of attention and listening. Rather than offering a single narrative, it invites visitors to slow down and engage with forms of knowledge that are often overlooked within dominant cultural frameworks. Emerging from Andean Amazonian territories marked by linguistic, cultural, and ecological plurality, the project advances a situated position that understands knowledge as something produced through shared experience and ongoing relation.

The practice of the Tawna collective is rooted in Pan-Amazonian ways of thinking that conceive existence as an active continuity among bodies, territories, and forces. Working from community-based and embodied experiences, Tawna understands sexuality and dreaming as sensitive technologies through which life is oriented, knowledge is transmitted, and care is organized. In their practice, language functions not as distant representation but as a living force that participates in the making of the world, activating connections between the personal, the collective, and the spiritual.

Oscar Santillán’s practice explores what exists beyond established notions of reality: those conditions that escape dominant systems of order and open other ways of perceiving the world. Moving across science, emerging technologies, and ancestral knowledge, his work insists on indeterminacy as a fundamental condition of life. From this perspective, the terrestrial, the technological, and the cosmic are understood as interconnected and continuously shaping one another.

The encounter between Tawna and Santillán does not aim for synthesis or resolution. Instead, it sustains an open space in which different ways of inhabiting and understanding the world can coexist without being reduced to a single framework. Art operates here as a practice that holds this openness, creating the conditions for new forms of perception, relation, and coexistence.

Rather than representing a fixed national identity, Tawna & Oscar proposes a contemporary position grounded in situated knowledge, relation, and material responsibility, offering tools to think with the present and imagine multiple possible worlds.

COMMISSIONER

The Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art (MAAC) is a key cultural institution in Ecuador, dedicated to preserving archaeological and modern heritage, promoting contemporary art, and serving as a bridge between the country’s historical memory and its present cultural landscape. As custodian of 60,000 pre-Hispanic archaeological objects and 3,500 works of modern and contemporary art, the MAAC fosters spaces for encounter, critical reflection, and research. With approximately 120,000 annual visitors and a strong public program, it has established itself as a dynamic institution with an international outlook.

CURATOR

MANUELA MOSCOSO is the inaugural Executive and Artistic Director of the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and, in 2025, curated the 2a Bienal das Amazônias. Formerly curator of the Liverpool Biennial (2021) and a senior curator at Museo Tamayo, Moscoso focuses her work on relational, political, and embodied approaches to contemporary art and institutions.

EXHIBITORS

OSCAR SANTILLÁN is an Ecuadorian artist working between Ecuador and the Netherlands. His practice explores science, ancestral technologies, and the concept of the “Anti-world,” dissolving boundaries between the natural and artificial. His work has been shown internationally and he is active in art education.

TAWNA is an anti-colonial collective of Sápara, Kichwa, and mestizo artists founded in 2017. Working with video, photography, and living archives, they create narratives from Amazonian territories through ritual, dreaming, and community-based processes. Their work has been shown internationally.

INSTITUTIONAL LEADERSHIP Romina Muñoz Procel (Vice Minister of Culture of the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture, Ecuador), Stephanie García Albán (Executive Director MAAC)

RODUCTION & PR Anna Shvets TAtchers’ Art Management

EXHIBITION DESIGN Studio Manuel Raeder

SUPPORTERS Vice Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture, Vice Ministry of Tourism, Embassy of the Republic of Ecuador in Italy, Foundation Identidad Nacional, NIRSA, James Fuentes Gallery, Foundation EACHEVE, Livia Benavides Gallery, Global Transport, TAtchers’ Art Management, Colecciona.Art, Pily Estrada Lecaro, Dos Islas Studios, Giada Lusardi

PAVILION OF ECUADOR – ADDRESS: Castello 1636/A, Venice, Italy

OPENING: Wednesday 6 May, 4 PM, RSVP by 4 May to tatchersartmanagement@gmail.com

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC May 9 – November 22, 2026, daily except Monday, free entry. May: 11 – 6 PM, June:

11 – 5 PM, July-November: 11 – 4 PM

MEDIA CONTACT: tatchersartmanagement@gmail.com WhatsApp: +7 903 2252210, Tg/ Mob: +593 96 773 0929

MORE INFO: https://pavilionofecuador.art, https://www.instagram.com/maacec

#EcuadorPavilion #PavilionOfEcuador #TAWNA #OscarSantillan #MAAC #ContemporaryArt #BiennaleArte2026 #InMinorKeys

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The Story

12th March – 23rd May 2026

Founded twenty-eight years ago, HackelBury traces its origins to the lifelong passion for art shared by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel, collectors for more than thirty-six years. This exhibition brings together the works which first ignited their interest in photography and helped shape their collecting philosophy long before the gallery opened. It also celebrates the artists whose practices have defined HackelBury’s identity across the decades.

From modernist masters such as Edward Weston, Margaret Bourke-White and Consuelo Kanaga, to artists who have exhibited at the gallery including Ellen Auerbach, Berenice Abbott and Arnold Newman and to influential contemporary voices such as Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Joanne Leonard, Doug & Mike Starn, Bill Armstrong and others, the exhibition honours the individuals who have shaped HackelBury’s past and continue to inspire its future.

The works on view — ranging from Irving Penn’s Cigarette No. 111, William Klein’s exuberant painted contacts, Joanne Leonard’s domestic interiors to Margaret Bourke-White historic image of the United Statses Airship ‘Akron’, celebrate the personal and artistic relationships at the heart of the gallery’s story. They also illuminate Sascha and Marcus’s enduring commitment to championing artists who push the boundaries of their medium to create meaningful and contemplative work.

Curated as a “memoir” with selections made by founders Sascha Hackel and Marcus Bury alongside contributions from the HackelBury team, the exhibition offers a shared reflection on the images and artists which resonate at HackelBury. It is a celebration of works, a tribute to the relationships which have shaped HackelBury, and an homage to the artists who continue to define the gallery’s vision.

About HackelBury Fine Art

HackelBury was founded twenty-eight years ago by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel. The gallery is committed to championing artists working with the visual arts who push the boundaries of their medium to create meaningful and contemplative work.

The London based gallery initially showcased classic photography from the 20th century including Henri Cartier- Bresson, Berenice Abbott, Malick Sidibe, and Sebastião Salgado. The transition from traditional photography to more conceptual work was as intuitive as it was organic, beginning with artists such as William Klein, Pascal Kern, Doug and Mike Starn, Garry Fabian Miller, Katja Liebmann, Ian McKeever, Stephen Inggs and Bill Armstrong.

In recent years the gallery has taken on emerging artists such as Oli Kellett, Nadezda Nikolova, Alys Tomlinson, Coral Woodbury and Sharon Walters.

Each artist, whether emerging or established, creates work defined by a depth of thought and breadth and consistency of approach. The small group of artists with whom HackelBury work, represent a diversity of practice yet share an artistic integrity which the gallery is fully committed to supporting in the long term.

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The HackelBury Story     

Sascha Hackel, co-founder of HackelBury Fine Art, entered the art world not through formal training but through an early love of black-and-white cinema. After moving to London in her twenties, a chance encounter at Hamiltons Gallery gave her an unexpected start in the photography world — a trial week which turned into seven years working with major photographers and learning the market from the inside at a time when photography was scarcely recognised as fine art in the UK.

She and her husband, Marcus Bury, became passionate collectors in the 1990s — the days when an Irving Penn print could still be bought for £1,500 and when viewing 600-lot auctions at Sotheby’s or Christie’s was an education in itself. Their shared instinct for discovering photographers under-recognised in London became the seed of a future gallery.

In 1998, with a one-year-old at home, the couple transformed a dilapidated local frame shop, on Launceston Place, into HackelBury Fine Art. They opened not with glamorous fashion photography but with Roman Vishniac — a statement of seriousness, integrity and historical depth. From the start, they built their programme around artists who had not been properly exhibited in London, developing long-standing relationships defined by trust, loyalty and a deep belief in each artist’s work.

Although rooted in photography, HackelBury has always followed its artists as their practices evolve, supporting shifts across disciplines as naturally as they unfold. Over the years, the gallery has championed photographers moving into new mediums — from drawing to filmmaking — and has worked closely with multidisciplinary voices such as Doug and Mike Starn and Ian McKeever, whose practice bridges photography and painting, and Coral Woodbury, whose work spans image, object and text. This commitment to accompanying artists on their creative journeys has become as central to the gallery’s identity as its dedication to photographic practice itself.

Over 25+ years, HackelBury became known for championing humanist, street and conceptual photography, introducing London to figures such as Pascal Kern, Martine Franck, Malick Sidibe, and later forging decades-long collaborations with artists including Doug and Mike Starn, William Klein and Marc Riboud. Unlike many galleries, they still operate without contracts —relationships sustained by trust, shared values and a commitment to supporting artists through everything from health crises to book publishing.

Through constant shifts in the art world, from the 2008 crash to COVID to a transformed media landscape, the gallery has persisted by staying true to a core ethos: only show artists whose work they would collect themselves; invest deeply and emotionally in every relationship; price work ethically; and prioritise long-term development.

In recent years, a new generation of women artists has entered the programme, reflecting a conscious shift toward nurturing female voices and emerging talents who resonate emotionally and conceptually with the gallery’s history.

The Story exhibition brings all of this together — not a retrospective of artists, but a meditation on 29 years of relationships, instincts, risks and quiet revolutions within the photography world.

Paintings by Sabrina Shah on surfaces by Shane Bradford

Trespass is an unusual collaboration between Union curator Shane Bradford and painter Sabrina Shah. The project is intended to test the jurisdiction of creative authorship in a traditional gallery setting. While these works are firmly Shah’s painting, the fact that they have been painted on top of abandoned former works by Bradford defines the series. Doubts arise. Questions are posed: what does it mean to trespass? Where is the consent?

To all these queries there is only one reliable response: the exhibition itself. A complex curatorial conundrum has been initiated, the outcome of which is visible in the actual event of the exhibition experience. If there are answers, they reside within the dynamism of Shah’s brushstrokes and the inherent surprise of the unpremeditated symbiosis between the protagonists.

Shah’s spontaneous, unfiltered, and immediate paint-handling is supported by the show’s context, allowing for the event to remain in progress. The imagery often depicts participatory social happenings to which the viewer is invited. The result is a gloriously jarring and unexpected extension of Shah’s painterly psycho-dramatic fiction.

Shah has a history of reworking her older paintings. The previous layers and scars are important. This time, however, her imagery responds to the incomplete narrative threads of Bradford’s beginnings’. Suggestive traces of basketball courts, road traffic barriers, and abandoned train tracks are picked-up on and answered with animals, characters, toys, and games. 1,2,3. First, second, and third. Is anybody winning?

While Bradford’s backgrounds perform the dual role of story and substrate to provide an authentic foundation for Shah’s primary interventions, an intimate yet delightfully unstable bond is formed. Despite the literal cover-up there is no hiding; the uncertain friction between object and ground makes for an atmosphere of palpable vitality. There’s a raw honesty in the dynamic fusion of the paintings that perfectly platforms Shah’s naturally expressive and distinctive idiosyncrasies.

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Publishing in Art Style Magazine is free of charge for anyone. There are no article processing charges or other publication fees. Art Style Magazine is independent and supports the Open Access Movement. The editors of Art Style Magazine cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in essays and articles published on the Art Style Magazine’s website and editions. Authors agree to the terms and conditions and assure that their submissions are free of third parties’ rights. The views and opinions expressed in the essays and articles are those of the author and do not reflect the views of Art Style Magazine. The authors of Art Style Magazine’s essays and articles are responsible for its content. The Art Style Magazine‘s website provides links to third-party websites. However, the magazine is not responsible for the contents of those linked sites, nor for any link contained in the linked site content of external Internet sites (see Terms & Conditions).

Art as a Bridge Between Cultures.
OmenaArt Foundation and LuginsLand of Art’s Thematic Pavilion at the Malta Biennale 2026

The OmenaArt Foundation and LuginsLand of Art will once again be situated at the intersection of cultures and contemporary artistic practices. In 2026, the Foundation returns to the Malta Biennale, with a thematic pavilion titled Redefining. Polish-Ghanaian Textile Narratives.

Curated by Natalia Bradbury, the exhibition will feature large-scale textile installations by Marta Nadolle, Eliza Proszczuk, and Ernestina Mansa Doku, created during their artistic residency in Malta. The artists, coming to Malta from Poland and Ghana, will intertwine the historical narratives of both countries, drawing on weaving traditions and the island’s local heritage. Their collaboration began during Accra Cultural Week 2025 in Ghana, where, together with local artists Moses Adjei, Cornelius Annor, and Raphael Adjetey Adjei Mayne, they conducted art workshops for children exploring the textile art heritage of Poland and Ghana. The workshops took place at Kids Haven School, built by the Omenaa Foundation.

“Our exhibition explores the theme of historical bonds and solidarity between Poland and Ghana. Through the artists’ works, we want to show that despite distance and differing experiences, we are united by shared emotions and values,” says Natalia Bradbury, curator of Redefining. Polish-Ghanaian Textile Narratives. “Ernestina Mansa Doku brings to the project an organic approach to material and nature; Eliza Proszczuk contributes a reflection on memory, emancipation, and the body; while Marta Nadolle offers a perspective focused on interpersonal relationships and observations of tensions between the public and the private. The juxtaposition of these three practices makes it possible to create works that operate both through personal narrative and through the universal language of contemporary art, legible within the international art circuit,” Bradbury emphasizes.

Running from 11 March to 29 May 2026, the OmenaArt Foundation’s thematic pavilion will reference the philosophy of Ubuntu – “I am because we are” – emphasizing interdependence, community, and mutual respect. This idea links the artists’ collaboration with historical Polish-Ghanaian relations that have developed since the 1960s. The artworks will be accompanied by a premiere sound installation by the composer Mariusz Szypura. The pavilion will also feature a public program including debates, panel discussions, and meetings with international experts.

The thematic pavilion is organized by the OmenaArt Foundation, which is dedicated to fostering relationships and promoting artists from Central Europe and West Africa. In 2025, the Foundation presented its African art collection for the first time at the TOP CHARITY Art exhibition at the Orangery of the Wilanów Palace. Also, OAF supported the creation of a monumental work by Ibrahim Mahama, which was exhibited at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art. The OmenaArt Foundation works closely with Phenomenaa Gallery in Warsaw, consistently strengthening the presence of African and non-European artists on the Polish art market.

“In recent years, African art has secured a significant position on the global art scene. Works by artists such as Amoako Boafo and Julie Mehretu achieve record-breaking prices at auctions and are presented in leading cultural institutions. In 2025, ArtReview magazine named the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama the most influential figure in contemporary art. That is why I am proud that through the activities of my Foundations, we support artists from this continent – investing in art and education, including through the construction of the innovative Kids Haven Sport & Art Complex in Ghana, and promoting their work on international platforms,” says Omenaa Mensah, CEO of the OmenaArt Foundation.

“I am especially delighted that our exhibition, presented during the Malta Biennale 2026, will highlight how powerful and inspiring intercultural dialogue can be – between Poland and Ghana, Europe and Africa – in the extraordinary setting of a Mediterranean island,” Mensah adds.

The exhibition will explore intercultural relationships across past, present, and future perspectives, while simultaneously interpreting the central theme of Malta Biennale 2026 – CLEAN | CLEAR | CUT – which refers to ideas of repair, connection, and purification.

The OmenaArt Foundation and Luginsland of Art project highlights the significance of the Polish and Ghanaian contemporary art scene. Through its presence at the Malta Biennale – an important global artistic platform – it strengthens intercultural dialogue and promotes the rich textile traditions of Poland and Ghana.

Artists

Ernestina Mansa Doku

Ernestina Mansa Doku (b. 2001) is a Ghanaian visual artist of the younger generation who lives and works in Accra. She works primarily with acrylic paint, as well as artistic textiles, animation, and sculpture. She completed her BA in Painting and Sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, where she is currently continuing her MA studies in the same department. She is a member of the blaxTARLINES collective. In 2024, she received a scholarship from the OmenaArt Foundation as part of the Artis Arundo programme, which supports emerging talents.

The artist draws inspiration from nature and how it adapts to changing conditions and environments: pushing through cracks, clinging to surfaces, and intertwining with other objects. In her practice, she seeks to challenge anthropocentric perceptions of lived experience, opening space for a posthumanist perspective. She describes her creative processes as a form of surgical intervention; through deformation, reorganisation, transformation, multiplication, or division of forms, she strives to create something new. In the act of creating, Doku consciously embraces spontaneity and the role of chance. Her painting reflects horror vacui (Latin: fear of emptiness) – the artist deliberately saturates space with details and elements that often go unnoticed in everyday life.

Marta Nadolle

Marta Nadolle (b. 1989) is a Polish visual artist specializing in painting. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, receiving her diploma with distinction in 2014. In her artistic practice, she addresses themes of love, alienation, coming of age, intimacy, and interpersonal relationships. She reworks the tradition of the veduta, intertwining it with inspirations drawn from folk culture. By setting together these seemingly disparate elements and customs, she crosses the line between what is central and what is peripheral, between the public and private. Her works combine metropolitan narratives with intimate handcraft and folklore, exploring the emotional landscapes of the metropolis. From Nadolle’s paintings emerge the desires of contemporary city dwellers – for genuine closeness and some emotional calm.

Winner of Paszporty Polityki Prize 2023 in the field of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited both in Poland and internationally, including in Warsaw, Łódź, Sopot, Wrocław, Poznań, Prague, Bratislava, Stockholm, and at NADA Art Fair in Miami (2021). She has held several solo exhibitions, including Don’t Worry (LETO, Warsaw, 2022), I’ll Send Him Nudes (Galeria Dobro, Olsztyn, 2021), and 35 (Galeria Art Hub, Łódź, 2024). Nadolle’s works are held in the collections of the National Museum in Gdańsk, the Museum of Warsaw, and the mBank collection.

Eliza Proszcuk

Eliza Proszczuk (b. 1980) is a Polish visual artist, PhD in Fine Arts, academic lecturer, and researcher. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Faculty of Painting, 2006) and from the AKV St. Joost in Breda and Den Bosch (Netherlands), where she earned an international Master of Fine Arts degree (2009). She creates textiles, spatial objects, and collages, treating art as a tool for social change and a space of emancipation. In her practice, she explores themes of memory, inheritance, and women’s herstory, combining artistic activity with research and social engagement.

She has carried out projects with marginalized groups, including incarcerated women, patients of addiction treatment centers, and refugees. She is the author of, among others, the project Girls from the Castle, created in collaboration with female inmates of the Warsaw-Grochów Detention Centre (Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, 2014; CSW Kronika, 2022), which examined childhood as a cell and culture as a prison.

She draws inspiration from the traditions of northeastern Poland, where she comes from, reconstructing and reinterpreting women’s crafts and narratives erased from official history. She collaborates with international academic and artistic institutions, including the University of St Andrews in Scotland and Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2022, she received a four-year COST grant (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) for a research-artistic project on sisterhood and social justice. Proszczuk is a co- editor of the publication Traces of Sisterhood (Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw Press) and a co-organizer of events combining art and science, such as Care and Repair: Ungendering Memory and Museum Practices (Ethnographic Museum, Ljubljana, 2023) and Connecting Lines: Tracing Care at the Intersection of Feminism and Ecology (City of Women, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 2024). Since 2017, she has been working at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she leads the Textile in Architecture Studio. She is a two-time recipient of scholarships from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and ZAiKS. She finds inspiration in the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini: “Culture as prison, art as liberation” – and consistently creates spaces where art becomes a tool for experimentation, therapy, and social transformation.

Mariusz Szypura – Sound Installation

Mariusz Szypura (b. 1972) is a composer, music producer, and audiovisual artist working at the intersection of music, design, and contemporary art. After years of activity on the Polish alternative scene (Happy Pills, Blimp, Silver Rocket), he focused on interdisciplinary artistic projects in which sound becomes a sculptural material and a tool for shaping experience.

In recent years, he has concentrated on large-scale audiovisual installations. In 2024, at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, he presented the project in:human – an immersive environment exploring relationships between humans and technology through multichannel sound and image. During the Unsound Festival at Lincoln Center in New York, he presented êkhos, combining electroacoustic composition with stereoscopic projections.

His most extensive artistic undertaking is Chopin Residue – an international audiovisual project deconstructing the work of Frédéric Chopin through experimental compositional techniques combined with large-scale imagery, video installation, and spatial sound. In its musical layer, co-created with artists such as Adrian Utley, Lee Ranaldo, John Stanier, and Fennesz, it has been presented in venues including New York and Osaka. As a composer of music for exhibitions, Szypura creates autonomous sonic environments that engage in dialogue with both the artwork and the architecture. His compositions do not illustrate – they shape the rhythm of perception, the intensity of experience, and the viewer’s relationship with space.

Curator – Natalia Bradbury

Natalia Bradbury is an art historian, curator, and art advisor, living and working between Poland and the United Kingdom. She is the Executive Director of OmenaArt Foundation and Phenomenaa Gallery in Warsaw, which specializes in contemporary African and non-European art.

Her main area of research focuses on the growing significance and market value of a new generation of artists from West Africa and its diaspora, as well as from Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Poland. In her work, she analyzes the factors influencing the development of this segment, including relationships between global institutions, galleries, collectors, and auction houses. She initiates projects that situate contemporary artistic practices of Polish and African artists within a broader economic, social, and geopolitical context.

She is the author of exhibitions such as TOP CHARITY Art (2024, 2025), Other Geographies, Other Stories (Malta Biennale 2024, with Hanna Wróblewska), and Redefining. Polish-Ghanaian Textile Narratives (Malta Biennale 2026), co-curator of the Kids Haven Sport & Art Complex in Ghana. Mentor at Rafał Brzoska Foundation, she also serves as a juror for artistic competitions, including the 16th edition of Best Artistic Diplomas, organized by the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, and Loostro – Competition for Young Artists.

Organisers – OmenaArt Foundation & Luginsland of Art

About OmenaArt Foundation

OmenaArt Foundation implements unconventional artistic projects in Poland and internationally. The Foundation’s mission is to build intercultural dialogue, support artists, and promote contemporary art from Eastern Europe and Africa, with a particular focus on art in public spaces. OAF is also actively involved in the revitalization of historic buildings and in conservation and educational projects.

The Foundation coordinates the TOP CHARITY Auction – one of the most significant philanthropic events in Europe. Over the course of four years, the auction’s organizers have raised more than PLN 145 million. The funds have been allocated to the charitable work of the Omenaa Foundation, the Rafał Brzoska Foundation, and the Philanthropic Consortium, as well as to OmenaArt Foundation projects supporting artists and cultural institutions.

About Luginsland of Art

LuginsLand of Art organizes artist residencies, exhibitions, and public programmes in Malta. The project aims to breathe new life into one of the island’s most important architectural gems – Villa Luginsland in Rabat. The historic property, currently undergoing restoration, will be transformed into a center for exhibitions, discussions, and artistic events, fostering international artistic exchange and open dialogue about the past, present, and future.

Malta Biennale

Malta Biennale is an international contemporary art initiative inaugurated in 2024 under the patronage of UNESCO and the President of the Republic of Malta. The biennale’s concept centers on dialogue between contemporary art and cultural heritage – exhibitions are presented in historic sites, including Valletta, the Three Cities (Birgu, Cospicua, Senglea), and the Cittadella in Gozo.

The inaugural edition featured over 100 artists from 35 countries, as well as 14 national and thematic pavilions across 21 historic venues. The first participating countries included Poland, France, Germany, China, Austria, Serbia, Ukraine, Italy, Spain, and Malta.

This year’s Malta Biennale will take place from 11 March to 29 May under the theme CLEAN | CLEAR | CUT. The event’s Artistic Director is Rosa Martínez, a renowned curator and Artistic Director of the 51st Venice Biennale. She has also directed or curated biennials in Barcelona (1988–1992), Rotterdam (1996), Istanbul (1997), Santa Fe, New Mexico (1999), Busan (2000), São Paulo (2006), and Moscow (2005–2007).

Redefining. Polish-Ghanaian Textile Narratives

Thematic Pavilion of the OmenaArt Foundation, Malta Biennale 2026 (11 March – 29 May 2026)

Venue: Old Armoury of the Knights of Malta, Birgu, Malta Artists: Ernestina Mansa Doku, Marta Nadolle, Eliza Proszczuk Curator: Natalia Bradbury

Organisers: OmenaArt Foundation, LuginsLand of Art

Partners: Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Valletta, Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Phenomenaa Gallery, Apart, Luce&Light, LOT Polish Airlines

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To Pulse, One Must Love: On Kim Dotty Hachmann’s Pulsar

Essay by Natasha Marzliak, Curator, Art Critic, Professor of Art History and Aesthetics, and Associate Editor of Art Style International Magazine

About the artwork »Pulsar« (2008–2024) by Kim Dotty Hachmann, video installation, 120 x 120 cm, white plaster cast from silicone mold, AI-generated video projection, sound; on view at Ausstellung „Aus heiterem Himmel“, November 1–23, 2025, Verein Berliner Künstler in cooperation with the A und A Kulturstiftung, part of the selection of artists nominated for the Kunstpreis für Bildende Kunst 2025.

»Pulsar« (2008–2024) by Kim Dotty Hachmann is a liminal artwork, situated in a threshold space: it invites the viewer to the impossible experience of seeing birth through the eyes of the one being born. This perceptual shift, created through the sculptural womb receiving a video projection generated by artificial intelligence, does more than represent birth; it invites the viewer to inhabit this state of coming into being in a way that is both intimate and disorienting. What is normally assumed as a self-evident beginning – the arrival into the world – is rendered strange, making the body, time, and relational conditions visible as active, contested dimensions.

The choice of the title, Pulsar, emerges naturally from this experience of threshold and passage. Coming from Latin-based languages – Portuguese and Spanish – the word carries the sense of pulsing, a rhythmic insistence that is felt physically and intuitively. Its pronunciation and cadence resonate with the ongoing, insistent force of life, preparing the viewer for the embodied experience of the installation that follows.

The white plaster womb, cast from a silicone model, functions simultaneously as membrane and surface. In this three-dimensional object, the video projection is not merely an overlay of image but a spatial inscription that transforms the volume into a body in flux, where presence, observation, and corporeality intersect. This practice, highly relevant in contemporary art, sits at the frontier of video-mapping and object-based installation: by projecting onto the womb, Hachmann creates a hybrid materiality in which digital imagery interacts with physical form, making the act of seeing inseparable from the act of being present. The body pulses alongside the viewer who experiences it in that moment, not as record or memory, but as a shared, in-the-moment event. In dialogue with the exhibition’s title, Aus heiterem Himmel, birth appears as something that comes unexpectedly – from nothing, yet also carrying the weight of a larger cosmology.

The sound layer is structuring for the work. Ancestral female chants are delivered through headphones, creating a focused listening space. This sound recalls practices that Western history medicalized, silenced, or disciplined, restoring birth to a ritual, communal, and cosmological dimension. Hachmann describes this experience as a “trance of self-empowerment,” repositioning maternity beyond idealization or stigmatization and making visible the agency of the female body. The artist’s declaration that “my female body is a gift” situates the work within a lineage of feminist practices that reclaim the maternal body from historical regimes of control and appropriation. In this sense, Hachmann’s gesture resonates with Mary Kelly’s pioneering works of the 1970s: in Anteparto (1973), Kelly transformed intimate traces of pregnancy into analytical records, and in Post-Partum Document(1973–79), she displaced the mother’s body from an object of representation to a site of enunciation, exposing how authority, authorship, and visibility are structured within patriarchal culture.

The artificial intelligence^[1] does not function as a neutral technical device; it acts as a proposer of ethical and existential questions. The imagery it generates occupies an in-between space: it is neither memory, nor representation, nor pure fiction. It attempts to imagine what cannot be remembered – the intrauterine space, the act of coming into the world – and in doing so, raises questions about how technology engages with the body, life, and the limits between human and nonhuman.

The title of this essay, »It Takes Love to Be Able to Pulse«, summarizes the ethical dimension the work evokes. The pulse is not only a heartbeat, but a cosmic vibration; a condition of shared existence, dependent on care, connection, and presence. Love here is not sentimentality, but a political, relational, and cosmogonic force. It is what sustains life and the very possibility of entering the world.

»Pulsar« returns us to the moment before consciousness, before language, before the world as we see it. At its core is the understanding that birth is not simply past, but a continual condition: we are always being launched into the world, always crossing membranes, always pulsating. The work opens a space onto this impossible moment, the impossibility of now, and in doing so, allows the viewer to recognize themselves as a body that vibrates, that is traversed, that inhabits this state of coming into being. Hachmann offers this passage as a form of reunion: with beginnings, with the body, with ancestry, and with the cosmos. In the end t reminds us that the pulse of life does not exist alone. To Pulse, One Must Love.

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^[1] The work was first presented in Next Level Sht* (2024) at INSELGALERIE Berlin, curated by the artist and Miriam Smidt, an annual exhibition dedicated to artistic practices engaging with artificial intelligence.

INSELGALERIE Berlin
Petersburger Street. 76 A, 10249 Berlin
www.inselgalerie-berlin.de

Next Level Sh*t: Digital Works in a (Still) Analog World, curated by Kim Kim Dotty Hachmann and Miriam Smidt, INSELGALERIE in Berlin

Exhibition: Next Level Sh*t | INSELGALERIE, Berlin | until 24 January 2026

Essay by Natasha Marzliak, Curator, Art Critic, Professor of Art History and Aesthetics, and Associate Editor of Art Style International Magazine

In Next Level Sh*t – digital works in an analog world, curated by Kim Dotty Hachmann and Miriam Smidt, INSELGALERIE in Berlin unfolds as a continuous site of tension between the physical and the virtual, the artisanal and the algorithmic, the human gesture and technological mediation. The addition of (still) to the subtitle, (a still analog world), does not belong to the exhibition’s official title, but serves, in this essay, as a critical inflection that I propose, a deliberate gesture to name a liminal moment, in which we live, a suspended, unstable temporality where the analog persists not as nostalgic residue but as an active field of contestation.

We inhabit a world increasingly saturated with synthetic images, AI-generated visualities, and regimes of hyperproduction that progressively hollow out the gaze. In this context, the question quietly underpinning the exhibition is not how to reject the digital, but how to continue producing meaning, experience, and relationality in an ever more fictive world, without losing sight of the fact that our relationships, affects, and corporealities remain profoundly “analog”. It is precisely within this interstice that the exhibition operates.

The curatorial structure resists a linear narrative of progression from analog to digital, favouring an experience composed of infiltrations, returns, echoes, and mirrorings, an expanded present in which matter and code no longer separate cleanly, and where the vision is constantly mediated by interfaces, platforms, and automated systems.

This logic manifests immediately upon entry, a print of an eye generated by artificial intelligence by Miriam Smidt greets the visitor, a static eye observing from the outset, functioning not as scenography but as a conceptual device, a non-human perception that precedes and frames the visitor’s experience. At the far right of the gallery, in the bar, a space of conviviality, distraction, and inebriation of Bacchus, the same eye returns in motion as an AI-generated video. Between print and video, between still and moving image, a silent circuit emerges that structures the entire exhibition, a continuous oscillation between presence and simulation, between what remains materially anchored and what flows, permeated by artificial intelligence.

The decision to begin the exhibition route on the right-hand side of the gallery, a deliberate choice of mine, reinforces this ambiguity. While this section hosts predominantly physical works, collages, paintings, prints, and objects, it does not constitute a sanctuary from the digital. The view has already been shaped at entry. The digital does not appear as a destination, but as a latent layer permeating the space, even where paper, paint, and matter remain tangible.

Within this liminal zone, Miriam Smidt’s works operate as a recurring conceptual axis. In Me, Myself, AI (2024), her images function as indices of subjectivity in constant modulation. Life, death, healing, and transformation do not emerge as opposites, but as transitional, fluid conditions.

This exploration materialises three-dimensionally in the series Update Us (2025), realised in 3D printing. Glandula Empathiae, Memoria Triplex, and Glandula Dissolutrix designate fictional organs, as if the human body needed to be redesigned to survive a world saturated with informational flows. The AI eye accompanying the visitor from entry to exit functions as an amplified metaphor, an organ without a fixed body, observing, learning, and returning images.

Also on the right-hand side, Swaantje Güntzel’s works offer a rigorous critique of contemporary landscape imagery. In Eisbär / Diamond Painting II and the installation Arctic Illusion (2025), popular artisanal techniques interrogate the aestheticisation of environmental catastrophe and the reproduction of stereotypical visions of the Arctic, now amplified through databases and AI-generated imagery. Dialogue with a chatbot in Arctic Illusion exposes the gulf between material urgency and discursive simulation, often more readily consumed than translated into transformative action.

Maja Rohwetter’s collages and paintings establish a poetics of fragmentation. In Paradise #1 and Paradise #2 (2024), as well as in Gemischte Gefühle #19 (2025), paradise appears as a precarious construction, composed of cut-outs, overlays, and ambiguous affective registers. The logic of collage dialogues directly with the aesthetics of digital interfaces, feeds, windows, and layers, while manual execution asserts the corporeal presence of the artist. In In the Vicinity of Life Parts (2011), painting extends beyond the canvas, entering processes of virtualisation that destabilise the analog rather than negating it, transforming the medium itself into a field of ontological inquiry.

Moving toward the left-hand side, the exhibition brings into view what until then had operated as a subterranean layer, the digital emerging as a space in its own right, experienced through the curators’ careful scrutiny. Here, NFTs from Kika Nicolela’s collection assume a central role. Navigation through this territory remains cautious, and rightly so. The infrastructures underpinning the crypto universe are neither neutral nor free from environmental, economic, or political contradictions. Yet within this context, NFTs do not present themselves as redemptive nor as absolute villains. They emerge as symptoms of our times, spectral spaces in which images, affects, and experiences exist without stable physical anchoring.

In A Working Day (2025), Estelle Flores offers a quiet observation of labour time within the digital economy. An ordinary day is transformed into an aesthetic unit, a datum, a record. The work neither accuses nor celebrates, but observes. As an NFT, the piece amplifies this ambiguity: lived time is captured, edited, and circulated. What precisely is being archived here, a day of work, or the experience of existing under continuous regimes of productivity?

In the feels – seventeen aka. stepping through the warp that I can only see (2025), the artist littlecakes constructs a brief yet intensely sensory video. The work operates as a fragmented affective experience, marked by unstable rhythms and discontinuous perceptions. The “warp” of the title is not merely visual or temporal, but psychic, an internal displacement, difficult to articulate, referring to emotional states mediated through the digital. The piece inhabits a space between presence and disappearance, like a ghost that manifests only as flow.

At the conceptual core of the exhibition, Ann Schomburg makes explicit what quietly permeates the entire path, infrastructures of intimacy. In CATThexis (2025), a complex and striking installation, visitors encounter a series of hybrid devices, physical works, a telephone through which they can “speak” to a cat, mirrors, digital interfaces, and a website narrating a futuristic story about human-animal relations. The narrative recalls elements from the film Minority Report (2002), in which technology monitors every gesture and glance. Visitors care for the animal, yet by failing to follow certain rules or protocols imposed by the digital control structure, they lose it. This tension between care, responsibility, and technological surveillance generates an immersive experience blending affection, frustration, and surprise, revealing how algorithms, digital systems, and attention economies shape relationships, desires, and visibility. Life, performance, and social practice intertwine, highlighting the active role of the visitor within the sensitive ecosystem the work constructs.

It is within this entanglement of works, languages, and media that (still), as a critical gesture, manifests its force. It does not signal nostalgia nor a refusal of the digital. It designates a heterogeneous transitional state. We are increasingly immersed in synthetic images and systems shaping perception, memory, and desire, while simultaneously relying on bodies, materials, and physical relations. The (still) marks this unstable interval, a time in which passage remains incomplete, with consequences still unresolved.

The question underpinning Level Sh*t is not new. It has arisen with the advent of photography, cinema, and video, and resurfaces now with symbolic artificial intelligence, NFTs, and digital environments: where is art headed? Perhaps the answer lies precisely in its capacity to endure. Art does not die. It appropriates, displaces, distorts, and reconfigures available media to render visible that which remains as yet unnamed.

The AI eye greeting visitors at the entrance, returning in motion at the end of the route, offers no answers. It returns the question to the visitor. Perhaps the exhibition’s subtitle, digital works in an analog world, speaks precisely to this, not a delay but a critical interval, a time necessary to think, feel, and conceptualise the observing before the analog becomes mere archive or fetish. This will not occur, as everything intertwines in the loose threads of contemporary art. Level Sh*t reminds us that we are midway along the path, and in the meantime, the responsibility to look and to think the gaze persists. It is incumbent upon us, artists, curators, critics, and audiences, to sustain this reflection.

INSELGALERIE Berlin
Petersburger Street. 76 A, 10249 Berlin
www.inselgalerie-berlin.de

Opening hours: Tue–Fri 2-7pm, Sat 1-5pm
Finissage of the show with artist talk: Sat 24th January 2-4pm

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