Between Stars and Signals

In installations, interventions and performative workshops, Aram Bartholl (*1972, Bremen, DE) interrogates our current media behaviour as well as the public economies tied to social networks and digital strategies of dissemination. By translating the contradictions of our digital daily lives into spatial settings, he confronts viewers with their own ignorance regarding global platform capitalism. At the same time, he uses the potential of public space to renegotiate network activities as forms of political participation on the analogue level.

For the installation Map, the familiar red pin used by Google Maps is removed from its regular digital context and installed in physical urban space as a nine-metre-high sculpture. Although the pin is now an integral aspect of digital daily life, as a tangible object it creates confusion, breaking with our expectations of public space. Inside the Kunsthaus Hamburg, Aram Bartholl shows only an image of the pin in the form of a postcard. These proportional shifts point to the platform’s logic and absurdity, criticizing the implementation of virtual maps in public life and the resulting loss of intuitive orientation.

Digital maps are also central to the video work 15 Seconds of Fame, which documents a performance created using a Google Street View car as it drove through Berlin. Aram Bartholl spontaneously followed the car on foot, creating a digital self-portrait that can now be viewed globally on the platform. The video’s title references Andy Warhol’s statement that everyone would achieve 15 minutes of fame over the course of their lives. The reduction of the time frame to seconds emphasizes our diminishing attention span in the digital media context, and the resulting shift in our perception of time.

Solo and group exhibitions include: Bauakademie Berlin, Berlin, DE (2024); Kunsthalle, Osnabrück, DE (2023); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Sao Paulo, BR (2022); Canadian Cultural Center, Paris, FR (2021); SF MOMA, San Francisco, US (2019); Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, KR (2018); ZKM, Karlsruhe, DE (2015)

Artist Zach Blas (*1981, West Virginia, US) is known for his critical examinations of the cultural and social consequences of technological advances. He develops multimedia installations as tools for making visible complex connections such as the intersections of the digital world, social ideals and individual fantasies.

The artwork The Unknown Ideal (Esalen Institute) is part of the trilogy Silicon Traces, a series of moving image installations that deal with the convictions, fantasies and histories that generate the visions of the future promoted by Silicon Valley. In this context, the series Unknown Ideal shows different views from within luxurious wellness resorts. These are places where tech entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley aristocrats seek respite and pursue their spiritual interests. Aside from establishments like the Kainchi Dham Ashram in India or the Dhamma Mahim Vipassana Centre in Myanmar, these also include the Esalen Institute in California’s Big Sur. The semi-transparent print on film fixed to the exhibition space’s windows depicts the pacific coast as seen from the institute, an image generated by Google Earth. Visitors are offered access to an abstracted and topographically flattened version of this intentionally exclusive view. While people once oriented their movements around constellations, mythological narratives and sacred places, today’s world is fully measured out by GPS and satellite-based cartographies – as is the individual. The Unknown Ideal touches on precisely this field of tension: the yearning for transcendence endures, but it is increasingly channelled, recorded and filtered through digital systems.

The video work The Facial Weaponization Suite also revolves around digital mapping. It visualizes the production and operating principles of a series of amorphous masks generated from various queer men’s facial data. These Fag Face Masks are a critical response to the idea of using facial recognition to determine someone’s sexual orientation. Zach Blas has also created masks focused on questions of racism, blackness, feminism, and technologies used at national borders. They criticize the use of biometric tracking technologies regarding their influence on discrimination pushing back against surveillance and social control.

Solo and group exhibitions include: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL (2025); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, US (2025); Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, ES (2024); Cape Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, FR (2023)

Nolan Oswald Dennis’ (*1988, Lusaka, ZM) para-disciplinary practice explores concepts of time and space within the context of the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization, interrogating the colonial notion of a singular world. Using an artistic vocabulary characterized by diagrams, drawings and models, Nolan Oswald Dennis examines the often hidden structures that shape the boundaries of our social and political imagination.

Accompanied by archival materials and prints, the large-format wallpaper recurse 4 a late planet (lush) interweaves cosmological, geological and techno-political knowledge into a speculative narrative about rock. Dennis visualizes the orbits of different “potentially hazardous objects”, among them the asteroid 99942 Apophis, which will pass very close to our planet in 2029. These celestial bodies, their movements and the dangers they pose are placed in relation to earthly implications and cultural technologies connected to rocks – for example in mythology, ritual or protest. Continuing these associations, the wall work is shown alongside a personal archive of photographs that show people throwing stones – an act typically understood as a gesture of defiance, resistance and change. A relationship emerges between cosmic threats and social protest. Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on historic, contemporary and future meanings of stone objects in motion, as well as their power both to end and reshape the world.

Solo and group exhibitions include: Gasworks, London, GB (2025); Swiss Institute, New York, US (2025); Kunstinsituut Melly, Rotterdam, NL; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, NL (2023); Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, CH (2022); 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennial, KR (2023); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, MACBA, ES (2018); 9th Berlin Biennial, DE (2016)

Charles and Ray Eames (*1907, St. Louis, Missouri, US; *1912, Sacramento, California, US) are two of the 20th century’s most significant designers. They designed furniture and architecture, always orienting their practice around the user’s needs and the premise that design should be available to a broad public. The couple also created exhibitions and worked in film and photography.

The short film Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe examines the idea of a logarithmic scale. The film illustrates an exponential sequence based on a factor of ten. Its starting point is a scene on Earth viewed from a bird’s eye perspective: a man and a woman are having a picnic in a park at Lake Michigan in Chicago. The image is overlayed with a white square whose sides measure one metre each. Consistently staying focused on the same point, the camera zooms out from the Earth in a succession of identical intervals of time and space, ultimately arriving at the edge of the known universe. From there, the process is reversed, and the camera returns to the initial scene at a sped-up pace. Now the focus turns to the micro level. The camera zooms in more and more closely until it reaches the atomic level of the man’s hand, diving into the universe of the smallest particles. A voiceover narrates the journey and compares the respective scales of what is pictured. Viewers are taken on a journey of quasars and quarks, to the most distant and the nearest, the largest and the smallest structures known to science. At its core, the film presents a worldview in which detail is understood as a pivotal factor in a unified whole.

Screenings include: Atlanta International Film Festival Gold Medal, US (1970); USA Film Festival (1971); Montreal Psychics Film Exposition & Festival, CA (1976); Council on International Non-Theatrical Events (C.I.N.E., 1978) Golden Eagle; Greater Miami International Film Festival Gold Medal Scientific Research (1978); 22nd Annual San Francisco International Film Festival Participation- Communication Competition (1978)

Since 2018, filmmakers Sasha Litvintseva (*1989, Murmansk, RU) and Beny Wagner (*1985, Berlin, DE) have addressed questions related to the body and its surroundings in their collaborative projects. The moving image serves as an essential tool for generating new worlds and perspectives, and for critiquing organizational regimes as well as the resulting systems of knowledge and power.

Constant is a filmic journey through the social and political history of measuring, both on Earth and in the outside universe. While measuring technologies and units were initially based on the human body, their parameters have gradually detached from this frame of reference. In three chapters, a disembodied voice invites viewers on a historical journey from the establishment of the first units of measurement to the origins of land surveying and the privatisation of territories that followed, all the way to the metric revolution and finally into the present day. This exploration reveals an increasing fragmentation of the existing unity between human, body, landscape and time, as well as the resulting bodily experience of scale and distance. The dimensions progressively surpass an individual human’s experiential capacities, making newly dematerialized units of measurement necessary.

Formally, these developments are mirrored in distorted images and sounds. Visual effects are stretched beyond their intended functions, allowing abstract spaces to emerge that exceed our ability to record them and our faculties of spatial orientation. Filmic and digitally generated images – themselves products of measuring systems – meet their own technological limitations, demonstrating the discrepancy between lived experience and symbolic abstraction.

Group exhibitions include: Taiwan Video Art Biennal, Taipei, TW (2023); Seoul Mediacity Biennial, Seoul, KR (2023); Festival of Science Documentary Film, Olomouc, CR (2023); Kurzfilmfestival Köln, Cologne, DE (2022); Camden International Film Festival, Camden, US (2022); IMPAKT Festival, Utrecht, NL (2022); Transmediale, Berlin, DE (2022)

Timo Nasseri’s (*1972, Berlin, DE) practice connects scientific principles with a deep sensibility for the poetic and the metaphysical. Inspired by the aesthetics of the Arabic script and the ornamental structures of Islamic art, his works enquire into concepts of eternity, transcendence and readability.

The group of works titled Nine Firmaments is based on an open, poetic-rational system that unfolds between cosmology, mathematics and the imagination. Within the structures of individual sculptures, time and space fold in on each other, as do the readable and the unintelligible. The objects titled Pion, Eidos, Hedron and Babel V recall fragments of an endless archive: visual idioms that elude attempts to decipher them definitively. Drawings transform into architectures and three-dimensional structures – a polyphonic spatial framework reminiscent of instruments and networks that cannot be stratified according to any known organizational scheme. With Nine Firmaments, Timo Nasseri finds a way of translating the ornamental logic of Islamic artwork, in which every pattern is a both surface (Zahir) and a hidden secret (Batin), into contemporary sculptural concepts.

The large-format sculpture Glitch is based on a rhombic shape often used in Islamic architecture, particularly for muqarnas ornaments. The complex system of pipes references an analytical geometric formula developed by Swiss mathematician Jakob Steiner. The three-dimensional structure creates an interplay of light, shadow and projection that forms an “ornament” of light. The sculpture’s appearance changes depending on the viewer’s perspective. Straight lines appear to bend, firm structures start to flicker. The title points to a productive confusion of the senses – a system that undercuts itself by way of its own precise construction.

The series One on One is also inspired by the muqarnas structure. Its starting point is formed by four different triangles with identical dimensions that can be continuously combined into new patterns. The drawings potentially stretch into infinity, but are limited by the paper medium – fragments of an endless space. Mathematical notations listing lengths and angles are inscribed along the lines. Drawing becomes a meditative practice in which repetition, variation and regularity are consolidated into a distinct aesthetic language. This makes every drawing draft a structure, an ornament, and a conceptual model in one.

Solo- and group exhibitions include: Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid, ES (2025); Arp Museum, Remagen, DE (2025); San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, USA (2024); Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art, Riyadh, SAU (2024); Taubert Contemporary, Berlin, DE (2022); Victoria and Albert Museum, London, GB (2021); MONTBLANC Haus, Hamburg, DE (2023); Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut; LB (2019)

Artist Trevor Paglen’s (*1974, Maryland, US) diverse body of work deals with subjects including mass surveillance, the military industrial complex and phenomena whose existence is intentionally hidden from the public. His conceptual approach aims to make the invisible visible and to blur the lines between art, science and investigative journalism.

The wide-ranging series of works titled CLOUDS, which both prints on view belong to, shows the “gaze” of the algorithm directed at the sky. The works draw on Paglen’s fascination with clouds: although atmospheric formations have been scientifically characterized at great length in complex cloud atlases and taxonomies, people nevertheless tend to imagine clouds as arbitrary shapes.

Trevor Paglen’s cloud pictures were created during a continuous study in which the artist examined how computer vision and AI systems “view” the world. The different algorithms used to create the images are programmed to react to faces, key points, areas of interest or geometric shapes, and to simplify photographs by dividing them into segments. This technology is now also used in autonomous surveillance systems, drones, facial recognition software and many other areas where computer vision is used. In his prints, Trevor Paglen layers technical, grid-like drawings with images of natural weather phenomena. This aesthetic approach to the impenetrable opens up a new dimension in celestial observation. Whether as thick cloud formations or delicate whisps of fog, his subjects remain opaque to the viewer.

Solo and group exhibitions include: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin, DE (2023); Pace Gallery, Seoul, KR (2022); San José Museum of Art, US (2021); Barbican Centre, London, GB (2019)

Simon Speiser’s (*1988, Regensburg, DE) multimedia artworks are characterized by traditional knowledges and mythologies connected to his Ecuadorian heritage. He links these traditions with the processes and forms of contemporary technology and expands on ancestral narratives with speculative elements. Norbert Pape’s (*1981, Stuttgart, DE) transdisciplinary practice incorporates dance and choreography, particularly in relation to mathematics. At this intersection, he uses visual technologies to explore new forms of perception and understanding. The artists’ collaboration is grounded in a shared interest in immersive experiments and the parallels between choreography, ritual and virtual spaces.

For Touching Clouds, the artist duo created a choreographic installation with the help of extended reality (XR) technology, which visitors are invited to activate in order to navigate and transform the physical and the virtual space, both in groups and as individuals. Floating clouds of dots in different forms – from abstract and organic entities to concrete objects such as tarot cards – can be touched, nudged, or moved around by hand. Sometimes these gestures leave marks on the objects’ surfaces. Through the XR headset, visitors moving around the virtual reality can see each other within the exhibition hall. This exploration of virtual space leads participants through their actual surroundings, while onlookers can observe as a choreography develops.

By asking viewers to dive into this artwork, Norbert Pape and Simon Speiser seek to create an awareness of how our senses are connected both in visible and invisible worlds. The medium of virtual reality makes it possible to experience a materiality of data, in this case even to touch it. From behind the headset, visitors learn what it means to literally be moved in space by this materiality. Touching Clouds asks us to reflect on how and where we are located, both in the analogue and the digital world.

Norbert Pape’s projects include: Julia Stoscheck Foundation, Berlin, DE (2024), Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, DE (2021), PACT Zollverein, DE (2020), LAB, Schwankhalle Bremen, DE (2016), Mousonturm Frankfurt, DE (2010)

Simon Speiser‘s solo and group exhibitions include: Alexander Levy, Berlin, DE (2025), Julia Stoscheck Foundation, Berlin, DE (2024), Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, NO (2023), Tate Modern, London, UK (2022), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, DE (2021), Goethe Institut Paris, FR (2017), Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, DE (2015)

Katie Paterson (*1981, Glasgow, GB) centres ecological, geological and cosmological questions in her artistic work. She explores the influence of time and environmental changes on human existence, as well as the implications of human activity in planetary contexts. In collaboration with scientists and with the help of new technologies, she creates tangible poetic experiences that situate viewers and their immediate surroundings within broader macrocosmic relations.

For The Cosmic Spectrum, the artist combines a delicate aesthetic with a research-based approach. The kinetic wall work is an exploration of the history of starlight – from the big bang to our current cosmic era, all the way into the distant future. Formally reminiscent of a colour wheel, the continuously rotating disc shows all the colours of the universe over the course of its existence. The pictured colour spectrum is based on speculative data gathered by leading scientists and by the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, which was conducted between 1997 and 2002 by the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO). The study measured the light of 200,000 galaxies, a large portion of the universe. By analyzing the collected data, astronomers Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined the average colour of contemporary outer space from the perspective of a typical person on earth. A light beige tone, this hue was named cosmic latte. The constant movement of the disc blurs the colours depicted, and with them the periods of time they represent, which are barely conceivable to the human mind.

The work 100 Billion Suns also uses everyday materials to illustrate a complex concept. Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest explosions in the universe, their brilliance 100 billion times stronger than our sun’s. Throughout the exhibition, confetti canons are fired off on multiple occasions. Each of them contains 3,216 paper fragments whose colours correspond to those of every gamma-ray burst documented to date. As a result, each rain of confetti produces a miniature version of these powerful cosmic events.

Solo and group exhibitions include: James Cohan Gallery, New York, US (2025); ARoS, Aarhus, DK (2024); Galleri F15, Moss, NO (2022); IHME Helsinki, FI (2021); NYLO The Living Art Museum, Reykavík, IS (2021); The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, GB (2020); Turner Contemporary, Margate, GB (2019); The Lowry, Manchester, GB (2016)

In her conceptual sculptural works, Marie Pietsch (*1992, Cologne, DE) takes up everyday objects and narratives and transforms them into new artworks consisting of materials such as ceramics, glass, aluminium and fabric. Her multidimensional installations often question our habits from a humorous perspective.

In her newest works, including Wie ist die Lage, the artist engages with motifs from meteorology. The large-format installation consists of a weave composed of cotton, linen and viscose. Her production method – a special adaptation of the jacquard weaving technique – involves multiple stages of image transfer. She begins with an analogue sketch that is digitized and subsequently transferred to a textile. The delicate lines running throughout the fabric are a sort of translation of weather observations and images of clouds developed through a combination of digital production processes and technical skill.

The work’s title is a humorous reference to a German phrase often used in small talk that carries different layers of meaning. Literally, the question “Wie ist die Lage?” (What’s the situation?) asks for a geographic or planetary location – but it is also used to ask about an individual’s wellbeing in view of external circumstances.

The two Anzeiger (indicators) recall flags that show the direction of the wind, although their orientation is firmly fixed. Made entirely of glass, these objects are not limited to predicting the weather. Rather, they stand for the juxtaposition of uncontrollable weather and world events, and the urge to evaluate them. They are also a humorous play on the meaning of the red flag. At beaches, it functions as a symbol to alert people of dangerous swells. As a slang term, red flag refers to behaviours or characteristics interpreted as warning signals about another person.

Group exhibitions include: Kunstverein Gastgarten, Hamburg, DE (2025); Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, DE (2023); Kunsthaus Hamburg, DE (2022); Dzialdov, Berlin, DE (2021)

Agnieszka Polska (*1985, Lublin, PL) appropriates computer-generated media in her artwork to reflect humans and their social responsibilities. At its core, her work is about observing individuals in the collective context and the metaphysical relationship between the universe and existence.

The three works on view are part of the series Braudel’s Clocks, which deals with the human understanding of time. This complex of works was inspired by the Doomsday Clock developed by researchers in 1947 as a symbolic indicator intended to illustrate the estimated likelihood of global catastrophe to the public. Its pointers are moved backwards and forwards according to the state of the world. As a result of social, political and ecological developments that have taken place since January 2025, the pointers are currently at a new record position of 89 seconds to midnight. Although the Doomsday Clock is a strong metaphor, the actual state of the planet cannot be grasped as a linear progression or in a temporal format.

Agnieszka Polska’s clocks encourage us to examine the complexity and subjectivity of time as a concept. Ticking in different rhythms, sometimes even counterclockwise, they point to our planet’s intricate networks and to the speed of time. Aside from questioning our culturally and socially constructed ideas of time as a localizing element, the artist also takes up a philosophical concept developed by Fernand Braudel to point out that time is not a universal phenomenon. The French historian and revolutionary explored our globalized world as a complex configuration of structures developing at different speeds. Time is perceived differently by different systems, entities and social groups. To illustrate these disparities, Agnieszka Polska’s artistic vocabulary combines motifs relating to technological phenomena, human and non-human imagery as well as micro and macro universes.

Solo and group exhibitions include: Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerpen, BE (2024); 24th Biennial of Sydney, Sydney, AU (2024); Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, DE (2023); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, DE (2022); The New Sun, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, AU (2021)

In abstract drawings and site-specific installations, Jana Schumacher (*1983 in Bonn, DE) addresses processes of transformation in society and the environment. Questions about the evidence behind both scientific and spiritual phenomena, as well as the interplay of chaos and order, are central to her practice. Her works often translate scientific discoveries into her formal language.

In the blue and black Scratch Drawings on view, the artist intuitively approaches uncertainties that exist within social structures and explores new approaches to localization within existing systems of orientation. The drawings resemble cartographic searches in which patterns of thought, scientific theories and systematic thought processes come together as a whole. Every page can be read as a microcosm whose encrypted clues point to larger connections.

Jana Schumacher’s multilayered working process involves applying paint, engraving and embossing, and is the foundation of her intuitive exploration of abstract structures. The technology takes up humanity’s oldest visual forms: engravings in rock walls – traces of stone-age attempts to understand the world. The artist borrows from this archaic cultural technique and reimagines it in the present day, where the quest for orientation in the time-space continuum has become multidimensional.

The artworks revolve around questions of navigation: How do we situate ourselves in a world whose systems are growing increasingly complex? How can space and time be documented when traditional coordinates fail us? Schumacher references symbols of physical orientation such as compass roses and sextants, which function as starting images in associative visual chains. Mathematically strict and dynamic elements encounter formations reminiscent of landscapes; geometric forms are layered across one another to create individual maps. Thus, a connection emerges between early methods of navigation, which relied on celestial bodies for orientation, and today’s planetary calculations.

Solo and group exhibitions include: Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin, DE (2024); Tombazi Mansion, Hydra, GR (2024); Museum der Arbeit, Hamburg, DE (2023); Haus des Papiers, Berlin, DE (2022); Museum für Druck und Papierkunst, Grebocin, PL (2021); Czurles Nelson Gallery, US (2019)

Hoda Tawakol’s (*1968, London, GB) artwork is rooted in a profound examination of individual and collective identity, femininity and the agency resulting from these concepts. To her, the body is a place of experience that appears in her textile sculptures and installations both as a protective shield and as a projection surface for deciphering power relations.

For the project From the Cosmos to the Commons, the artist drew inspiration from the ancient Egyptian goddess Nut, whose arched body once represented the heavens and the universe. The mother who ate the sun each night and gave birth to it each morning embodied a sacred understanding of the female body connected to creation, protection and the cosmic order. In contrast, the female body today is often commodified and stripped of its symbolic and generative powers. Motherhood, too – while inherently central to society and many spiritual systems – is relegated to the private sphere instead of being recognized as reproductive labour and the foundation of human existence.

For the exhibition at the Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hoda Tawakol developed the textile wall sculpture Goddess. Painted with ink and layered with symbolic forms – stars, figurines, and amulets – Nut is re-imagined as both a cosmic map and a maternal symbol. Small figurines hang from her hips like orbiting satellites; her womb overflows with talismanic objects – eyes, breasts, boats, claws, and wings – invoking cycles of birth, life, death and renewal. These sculptural elements reference ancient understandings of space and time rooted in myth, ritual, and bodily practices. In the midst of satellites and signals, Nut provides a map not produced by algorithms, but rather meaningfully and mythologically charged. The sculpture is a dualistic act of reclamation: While it challenges the female body’s historic marginalisation by positioning it within a spiritual framework, the artwork is also an expression of the artist’s cultural heritage, and an attempt to make it her own.

Solo and group exhibitions include: Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin, DE (2024); Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund, DE (2023); Museum for Art in Wood, Philadelphia, US (2023); Metrohan, Istanbul, TR (2023); La Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille, FR (2022); Villa Romana, Florenz, IT (2021); Hamburger Kunstverein, Hamburg, DE (2021), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, DE (2020)

On loan from the Stiftung Historischer Museen Hamburg – Altonaer Museum

Whether on land or in water, navigation technologies have always been essential to human survival. While celestial bodies helped people pinpoint their locations in antiquity, measurement tools and technologies have become increasingly precise over time, making it possible to determine and predict locations with ever-growing accuracy.

With the rapid rise in global trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seafaring also increased – a highly significant development for the city of Hamburg. The expansion of travel and seafaring led more and more port businesses to specialize in the production and sale of nautical measuring devices. Next to the compass and precision clocks, the sextant was a particularly important instrument used at sea. It relied on astronomical navigation, which is based on the calculation of the angle between a celestial object and the horizon. The positions of the sun and of constellations were essential indicators for estimating latitude. From 1866 onwards, Altona optician Heinrich Petersen also produced sextants for seafaring, and in 1870 he supplied Hamburg’s royal navigation school with nautical instruments. One of his devices, produced around the turn of the century, is on view here.