If the present state of affairs has taught us something, it’s that uncertainty just isn’t merely a passing state however a permanent situation. We reside in flux, navigating shifting landscapes – each literal and metaphorical – throughout digital spheres, private identification and bodily areas. These sentiments run deep in ‘Caught in a Landslide’, a bunch present spanning n.b.okay. and the KINDL, that includes works by Berlin-based worldwide artists who acquired the Berlin Senate’s 2024 visible arts work stipend. By way of video, sound, portray, sculpture, set up and efficiency, the exhibition explores how people and communities navigate precarity, revealing uncertainty not as simply one thing to be endured however as an energetic pressure shaping expertise, notion and belonging.
Some of the pervasive types of uncertainty right now unfolds within the digital realm. Tethered to our screens, we’re continually topic to algorithmic manipulation. Jasmin Werner’s set up clickfarm (2025) materializes this invisible economic system by recreating the makeshift working areas of click on farms – industries through which low-paid staff generate synthetic on-line engagement for political or industrial functions. Right here, cellphones are changed with hand-carved wood replicas made by Filipino artisans, neatly organized on metal shelving in a U-formation. Amongst them, a cluster of ‘telephones’ bears a number of eyes, some with tears trickling down in an eerie tackle the ‘all-seeing eye’. In Werner’s work, the motif is rendered paradoxical, given the hidden nature of those exploitative techniques, the place management lies within the arms of the unseen.
Whereas Werner’s clickfarm exposes how digital techniques manufacture synthetic engagement, uncertainty additionally operates on a deeply private stage. Some of the formative and universally felt intervals of instability is arguably adolescence. Who amongst us didn’t really feel their sense of self in flux amid the melodrama of our teenage years? Babette Semmer captures this sense in a sequence of work, which reinterpret German teen journal BRAVO’s ‘photograph love tales’ from the late Eighties. Most placing amongst them is Ute & Martin (2024), a portrait of two youngsters whose consideration is drawn past the canvas. Ute seems to be slicing Martin’s hair, but each put on an apprehensive, ambiguous expression. The portray has a ghostly high quality, its softened particulars and uneven lighting giving it the feel of a reminiscence slipping away, one thing ungraspable but persistent.
Simply as adolescence is marked by an unstable sense of self, displacement complicates one’s relationship to house. The problem of sustaining a way of belonging when its bodily markers are continually shifting is on the coronary heart of Stephanie Comilang’s The right way to Make a Portray from Reminiscence (2022), a video centred on the Thai diaspora in Berlin, notably the neighborhood that when gathered in Preußenpark. Recognized domestically as ‘Thai Park’, this casual market was a long-standing assembly level the place Thai immigrants would prepare dinner and share meals. Over time, it grew to become more and more commercialized, earlier than ultimately being relocated, disrupting what had change into a house away from house for a lot of. All through the movie, Comilang asks ladies working within the park to attract their houses in Thailand from reminiscence. From these sketches, she created gilded, 3D-printed sculptures modelled after conventional Thai spirit homes – buildings constructed to shelter ancestral spirits, which right here function poignant metaphors for diasporic resilience.
‘Caught in a Landslide’ makes clear that uncertainty isn’t just an exterior pressure however a state woven into lived expertise, highlighting precarity as one thing that permeates each the private and the collective. In Berlin, the place cultural establishments face price range cuts and the way forward for its inventive panorama feels more and more unstable, these themes tackle an added weight. But quite than framing uncertainty as one thing to be overcome, the exhibition acknowledges it as a persisting situation – one that’s neither inherently hopeful nor hopeless, however merely a basic a part of life.
‘Caught in a Landslide’ is on view at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, till till 4 Might and the KINDL, Berlin, till 6 July
Fundamental picture: Kristina Paustian, Youngsters from Eforie, 2025, video nonetheless. Courtesy: © Kristina Paustian
