Artists: Jan Berger, Göksu Kunak, Hamlet Lavastida, Arash Nassiri, Natis & Hasso Weiß Ehrenwerth, Adriana Ramić, Josefine Reisch, Xavier Robles de Medina, Simon Speiser, Zhiyuan Yang

KW Institute for Contemporary Art and BPA// Berlin program for artists are pleased to present BPA// Exhibition 2024 – Half-Light, featuring works produced by BPA// participants of the 2023–2024 cycle. The exhibition takes place on two floors of KW’s main building.

Half-Light navigates between clarity and obscurity through ten artistic practices. As the title suggests, the show explores a state where visibility is compromised and boundaries blur, where things are seen but not entirely understood. It is a space of ambiguity—of worlds in flux—where the real and the imagined, true and false, continuously shift.

While each work creates its own realm, several themes and questions recur. Reisch and Robles de Medina engage in re-readings of history and cultural memory, focusing on the (mis)representation of specific groups and delving into how identity is shaped by cultural narratives. Similarly, Kunak, Lavastida, and Yang explore historical events or symbols to critique power structures—from colonialism to political propaganda—examining the ways that political events or figures are visually and culturally reproduced. Both Berger and Natis foreground analyses of economic and social systems within the art world itself, employing virtual spaces, para-fictional writing, or performance as tools for critiquing present realities or imagining alternative futures. Nassiri, Speiser, and Ramić create liminal spaces—in between cultures, nature and technology, internal and external—that become speculative urban environments, translations of the spiritual into the digital, or abstract conceptual explorations of language. The works in Half-Light, each in their own unique way, play with the boundaries of reality and fiction, challenging us to reconsider how we perceive and define both.

The partnership between KW Institute for Contemporary Art and BPA// Berlin program for artists began in 2020. BPA// is an artist-led organization, founded in 2016 by Angela Bulloch, Simon Denny and Willem de Rooij. The program is centered around mutual studio visits between participants and mentors. It is punctuated with a range of public events, organized together with both artist-run spaces and renowned institutions. Participation in BPA// lasts two years. It is free of charge and participants receive support to produce new work.

Jan Berger (*1993, DE)

Act of Contrition (AOC), 2024

video installation, wood, oil paint, screen print, UV print, 3D-printed PET-G
dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist
In collaboration with: Theresa Büchner, Chris Dake-Outhet, Etienne Darcas, Katrin Dittmayer, Nina Lissone, Arootin Mirzakhani, Sebastian Sailer, Sarah Trottier
Video editor: Katrin Dittmayer
Music: Ian Rodriguez
3D modeling: Christian Zajac
Graphic design: Gossip
Magazines: Kathrin Baumgartner

Jan Berger explores the formation of subjectivity and the creation of cultural mythologies in online spaces as part of his artistic practice. To do so, he creates infrastructures for networked roleplay games in which users can test out prototypes for cultural spaces.

For Act of Contrition (AOC) (2024), Berger used the online gaming platform Roblox to create an infrastructure of this kind. The platform is typically used by young persons and benefits from the monetization of user-generated content. AOC is a pilot project as well as the name of a creative agency for digital content led by a team of teenage avatars who combine media-effective attributes drawn from Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young-Girl, rococo aesthetics, and Christian mythology. In-game recordings from AOC headquarters give us insight into the characters’ lived internet folklore, which extends from the digital realm into the exhibition space in the form of selected symbolic objects. Berger subverts Roblox by making use of the platform’s infrastructure to realize independent projects and experiment with alternative forms of artistic collaboration.

Göksu Kunak (*1985, TR)

Gone with the Wind, 2024

Car parts, latex weather balloon, video, sound, acrylic print, textile print, theater spotlights
Dimensions variable
38:58 min
Courtesy the artist

Göksu Kunak combines textual and audiovisual elements in their performances and installations to draw attention to (chrono-)political events at the intersection of stereotyped non-Western dramaturgies and (self-)censorship. In doing so, they interweave contemporary phenomena with an aesthetic that stages the body as a sculpture and muscles as objects.

A car accident at the center of their multimedia installation is a metaphor for a politically corrupt, patriarchal system. Gone with the Wind (2024) references a fatal car crash in the Turkish city of Susurluk in 1996, which culminated in a political scandal: The identities of the occupants of the car revealed suspicious connections between the Turkish government, the ultra-nationalistic paramilitary Grey Wolves organization, and the Turkish mafia, which pointed to a state within a state and created a watershed moment. A photograph of the totaled Mercedes went viral and later formed the basis for a popular Turkish soap opera. Kunak has re-envisaged and altered this image. Spatially augmented by car parts, the image serves as a simulacrum of state secrecy, the state’s corruption and policies of concealment and dissembling.

Hamlet Lavastida (*1983, CU)

Tercer Mundo, Tercera Guerra Mundial (Third World, Third World War), 2024

Paper-cut
Each 100 × 70 cm
Courtesy the artist

Causa No.1 – 1989. Nosotros los acusados aquí / Antonio de la Guardia y Font (The Case No. 1, 1989. We, the defendants here / Antonio de la Guardia y Font), 2019
Video, sound
1:55 min
Courtesy the artist

In his artistic practice Hamlet Lavastida examines the connection of Cuba’s political history and the country’s iconographic language. His large-format paper works create an ongoing documentary register that confronts didactic symbols with the language of oppression. In his series Tercer Mundo, Tercera Guerra Mundial (2024), Lavastida reveals visual connections he has observed between graphics and emblems of public Cuban institutions and those of ultra-nationalist or paramilitary organizations. In doing so, the artist calls for a critical examination of Cuban history and its transnational partnerships with other repressive regimes. In the video Causa No.1 – 1989. Nosotros los acusados aquí / Antonio de la Guardia y Font (2019), Lavastida collages clippings from military and historical magazines as well as original sound recordings from the interrogation of Antonio de la Guardia, who, like many other military officials, was executed by his own government. The work’s rhythm is inspired by the specific cinematographic narrative style in place during the early days of the Cuban Revolution.

Both work cycles exhibited here create cultural image archives documenting the oppressive force and psychological tools used in Cuban propaganda. Due to his artistic work and “aesthetic disobedience,” Lavastida himself was deemed a dissident and counterrevolutionary by the Cuban secret service and placed under surveillance. As a result, he was forced to leave the country in 2021.

Arash Nassiri (*1986, IR)

Untitled, 2024

Plastic, wood, LCD screens, video, aluminum truss

69 × 650 × 29 cm

Courtesy the artist

Arash Nassiri examines connections between culture and architecture as well as migration and belonging in his artistic practice. Using sculpture and moving images, he investigates how Western modernist ideologies and utopias remain within the landscape of Tehran, and how they can become visible through speculative scenarios and objects, paying special attention to liminal spaces.

His miniature models are second­hand playhouses from the brand EPOCH, modeled after English country houses and produced in Japan since the 1980s. Nassiri describes this translation as a collage in which a culture is viewed through the lens of another culture. The artist adds flickering displays with reproductions of animated advertisements from the streets of Tehran. Bathed in an orange half­light, the filmic settings distort our sense of perception: The houses hover in between idyllic suburbia and urban space, the seen and the hidden, the known and the foreign. In this visual experiment, absence and loss intersect with a melancholia for modernist progress.

Supported by the Institut Français and the French Ministry of Culture

Natis (*1986, CY)

& Hasso Weiß Ehrenwerth (*1988, DE)

Launch and Cease, 2024

Natis explores connections between his own psyche and Western ideals of subjectivity, particularly as embodied by the figure of the artist. He creates and uses different artist personas to investigate this, each with their own history, personality, and artistic practice. The first was Hasan Aksaygın, a Cypriot conceptual painter and storyteller of parafictional narratives who explores the individual and collective visual subconscious. He was succeeded by Hank Yan Agassi, a being from an unspecified future whose painting practice and research approach earthly materialities from a postordial (as opposed to a primordial) perspective.

For the current exhibition, Natis has created a subsequent artist persona, Hasso Weiß Ehrenwerth, a German-­British painter whose work is a daring blend of neo­-expressionism and surrealism. He limps with his left leg for psychosomatic reasons. Alongside Ehrenwerth’s painting, Natis also presents
his publication, Dialogues of Four Passions (2024), a parafictional theater script that describes how this new figure is integrated into his existing psychological structure and the challenges that come with it. His works on display include a number of objects that stand in relationship to Ehrenwerth as a new figure. These include a written contract, his walking stick, a pedestal, and The Painting Behaviour Modification Tool (2024), an instrument designed to improve one’s brushstrokes when worn.

Natis
Dialogues of Four Passions, 2024–
Screw­post book, presented with two Cypriot Orthodox votives in the shape of an arm and in the shape of a leg
18 × 23 cm
Courtesy archive of Natis

Hasso Weiß Ehrenwerth

Untitled, 2024

Oil on canvas

180 × 260 cm
Courtesy the artist

Natis
Collaboration Agreement, 2024
Wooden frame, glass, paper

73 × 93 × 3,5 cm
Courtesy archive of Natis

Natis
Pedestal, 2024
Fiberboard, Styrofoam, fabric

77 × 129 × 18 cm
Courtesy archive of Natis

Natis
The Painting Behaviour Modification Tool, 2024

Leather, wood, metal
Dimensions variable
Courtesy archive of Natis

Natis
Hasso’s Walking Stick, 2024
Wood
90 × ⌀2,8 cm
Courtesy archive of Natis

Adriana Ramić (*1989, US)

With respect to the body skeleton, 2024
Two-channel video installation, wood, sticker

Dimensions variable
59:17 min
Courtesy the artist

Unseen Behavior, 2024
Stickers on painted wood

Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist
Color correction: Pascual Sisto
With thanks to Bridgette Bien, Elmæ Muslija and Dennis Witkin

Adriana Ramić looks at the inner works of organic and machine creatures as well as their systems of behavior and understanding, drawing on studies of cognitive models, mathematical logic, and literature.

For With respect to the body skeleton (2024), she filmed the gaudy, delicate bodies of leaf beetles moving across ginger blossoms and transporting pollen. This installation takes philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s beetle-in-a-box thought experiment (1936–1946) as a starting point. Wittgenstein used this parable to argue against the concept of a private language, i.e. a language that only we understand and use to convey our most intimate sensations, such as pain. Each individual has a “beetle” (a personal experience) in their own box, but no one can look into another person’s box. It might be that each person uses the word “beetle” to denote something different—and yet language works. Someone else’s “beetle” is neither observable nor can it be confirmed. Perhaps their box is even empty. With this, Wittgenstein shows that the meaning of words does not reflect our private inner states but rather is created through public exchange within communities. Ramić uses this philosophical discussion to plumb the ineffable nature of interior experiences. In contrast to the beetles of Wittgenstein’s experiment, her beetles become visible while performing their tasks. They have left their boxes and, in doing so, urge us to reflect on how hidden interior experiences manifest and how we seek to convey them to the outside world.

The installation Unseen Behavior (2024) includes animal stickers collected from chocolate bars by the Croatian manufacturer Kraš, the arrangement of which recollects a classificatory system and reflects the architecture of the exhibition room.

Josefine Reisch (*1987, DE)

Prospects, 2024
Oil and sheet metal on velvet, moiré, canvas, cable pulls
Each 280 × 460 cm
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

Josefine Reisch takes up historic moments and figures in her artistic practice, recombining them in new visual and material compositions that question the value and validity of cultural heritage. She uses the Brechtian narrative technique of historicization to challenge the patriarchal subjectivity of the material mainstream in order to subvert conventional artistic depictions of femininity.

In Prospects (2024), two theater backdrops form the set for dramatic acts. The first act depicts the scene of a fragmented table, which references Catherine the Great’s fame and excess as well as her successes in Russia. The second act references a corporal element from Unser Leben (1964), the mosaic frieze on the facade of the Haus des Lehrers in Berlin, which was created by socialist-realist artist, Walter Womacka. Moreover, Reisch examines the depiction of women in the GDR within the specific context of German­-Russian relations. Both acts illuminate the historical perceptions and roles of women* in the political sphere, moving between instrumentalization and defamation as well as power and representation to reveal how controversial both the self­conceptions and external conceptions of women can be— particularly in the context of totalitarian systems.

Xavier Robles de Medina (*1990, SR)

Aaliyah. Queen of the Damned. Directed by Michael Rymer, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2002, 2023–2024
Acrylic on wood
83 × 74 cm
Courtesy the artist and Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, New York

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Directed by David Hand (supervising a team of sequence directors), Walt Disney Productions, 1937, 2023
Patinated bronze
24 × 32 × 10 cm
Courtesy the artist and Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, New York

Xavier Robles de Medina interweaves his personal experiences and queer Creole subjectivity with larger socio­political contexts in his practice, often making use of pop culture references.

His painting depicts a scene from the film, Queen of the Damned (2002), in which the first vampire, Akasha, is played by R&B singer Aaliyah, who died tragically young. This depiction is rife with cultural appropriations and serves as a metaphor for diasporic experiences and the consequences of colonialism. The work explores the complex ways in which characters are constructed and addresses how cultures intersect. It critiques how mainstream media shapes our understanding of history and identity. In Robles de Medina’s bronze relief, he references a scene from the Disney film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), questioning its colonialist depiction of nature as “wild” and “untamable.” Both works encourage breaking away from clichéd ideas of “otherness”, identity, and power.

Simon Speiser (*1988, DE)

La Visión del Monte (The Vision of the Wilderness), 2023

Mechatronic light sculpture, 3D prints, sound

Dimensions variable
20 min, alternating English and Spanish
Courtesy the artist

Simon Speiser examines the interplay of human and technological worlds, virtual reality, and inherited folktales. His works often make use of storytelling techniques, drawing on non-Western concepts of technology.

In La Visión del Monte (2023), Speiser tells four stories from Afro-Ecuadorian folklore about spiritual encounters in the rainforest, in the Ecuadorian province of Esmeraldas. These stories are based on tales told by his father and other inhabitants of Esmeraldas’ rural areas, and they convey the complex history of Ecuador’s maroon community and their spiritual traditions. Speiser’s mechatronic light sculpture uses an AI-generated shadow play and is accompanied by audio narration from the artist’s father. The same motifs serve as the basis for his collages and tintypes, which accompany the individual stories and depict them in an alternate form.

Un ruido (A Noise), 2023

Collage, graphite drawing
53 × 80 cm
Courtesy the artist

Un olor (A Scent), 2023

Collage, graphite drawing
56 × 81 cm
Courtesy the artist

Un sueño (A Dream), 2023

Collage, graphite drawing
55 × 55 cm
Courtesy the artist

Espíritus del manglar (Mangrove spirits), 2023

Tintype
12 × 10 cm
Courtesy the artist

Monte (Wilderness), 2023

Tintype
12 × 10 cm
Courtesy the artist

Zhiyuan Yang (*1992, CN)

Make a Little Sun, 2024
Video, sound
7:36 min
Courtesy the artist

Zhiyuan Yang has a conceptual practice that tackles the elitist barriers of the art world and undermines its systems by broadening and negating its given possibilities through different artistic strategies. Her critical inquiry is focused on capitalist and imperialist structures, the logic of resources and political crises, as well as the socio­political aftereffects that continue to impact future generations.

In Make a Little Sun (2024), Yang recreates a version of the first and only science­fiction film produced in China before the country’s economic reform and opening up. Intended as an educational film for children, Little Sun (1963) tells the utopian story of children as researchers who created an artificial second sun to increase food production in China. The film is considered an informal response to the Great Chinese Famine (1959–1961). Here, Yang reflects on a series of global events—such as the development of nuclear power and the expansion of space missions—criticizing strategies for modernization, its catastrophic consequences, and questioning possible alternatives to capitalism.

Alliance Knot, 2024
Cotton fabric, natural fiber ropes, artificial poppies
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist

China’s so-called century of humiliation was defined by famine and many outbreaks of violence, commencing with the forced trade of opium and the First Opium War (1839–1842), including the 1911 Revolution (which ended China’s last imperial dynasty), and concluding at the end of the Second World War. Alliance Knot (2024) references the Eight-Nation Alliance (Italy, United States, France, Austria­ Hungary, Japan, Germany, Britain, and Russia) that invaded Beijing in 1900 to suppress the anti­imperialist Boxer Rebellion movement, which arose to fight the dominance of colonial powers and their occupation of land and trade routes. Drawing on the military memorabilia of the era, Yang reproduced these nations’ naval flags in China and intertwines them with each other to commemorate the corrupted existence of such an alliance, fueled by a collective desire for power and wealth.

Curator: Linda Franken
Assistant Curator: Sophia Yvette Scherer
Curator Public Program: Anna-Lisa Scherfose
Head of Production: Claire Spilker
Technical Management: Wilken Schade
Head of Installation, Media Technology: Markus Krieger
Installation Team: KW Installation Team
Public Program and Outreach: Nikolas Brummer
Press and Communication: Marie Kube, Anna Falck-Ytter, Luisa Schmoock
Text and Editing: Linda Franken, Sophia Yvette Scherer
Translation and Copy-Edit: Sylee Gore, Sabine Reiher, Jayne Wilkinson
Academic Traineeship: Aykon Süslü
Interns: Kimia Godarzani-Bakhtiari, Louison Jenkins, Ula Alexandra Lucas

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