Xavier Robles de Medina, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Directed by David Hand (supervising a team of sequence directors), Walt Disney Productions, 1937, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Catinca Tabacaru Gallery. Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza.
BPA// Exhibition 2024
Half-Light
Free admission
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 and BPA// Berlin program for artists are pleased to present Half-Light, featuring works by second year BPA// participants produced over the course of their working period with the program. The exhibition takes place on the first and second floor of KW’s main house.
The exhibition is accompanied by a public program of tours and performances, that offer a deeper engagement in the artists’ practices.
BPA// is an artist-led organization, founded in 2016 by Angela Bulloch, Simon Denny and Willem de Rooij. It is an independent mentoring program that facilitates exchange between emerging and established Berlin-based artists. 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. The partnership between KW Institute for Contemporary Art and BPA// began in 2020.
Curator: Linda Franken
Assistant Curator: Sophia Yvette Scherer
Curator Public Program: Anna-Lisa Scherfose
Curatorial Introduction and Artist Biographies
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.
Umut Azad Akkel
Umut Azad Akkel’s installation The Path – Structure II in KW’s courtyard reflects the experience of confronting opaque and arbitrary bureaucratic systems that shape daily life. Developed since 2021, The Path series explores the relationship between self and city, informed by Akkel’s migration to Germany and existential pressures he faced in Istanbul. Echoing M.C. Escher’s impossible staircases, the large-scale structure uses raw construction materials to signal both obstruction and the (illusory) possibility of upward mobility. Scaffolding—now ubiquitous in growing metropolises—evokes sites of urban transformation often built on the precarious labor of countless migrant workers. Presented alongside The Path – Drawings and The Path – Prototype II the work materializes disorientation, fragility, and the ongoing struggle for renewal within hostile systems.
Umut Azad Akkel (b. 1991, TR) works between Berlin and Istanbul, creating participatory installations with objects, video-performances, drawings, and collages. His practice explores vulnerabilities and dysfunctionalities at the intersection of private and public relationships, public space and identity politics (queer and migrant). His solo exhibition It/Ortada will be shown at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (2026), following its earlier version at İmalat-Hane, Istanbul (2024).
Felisha Carénage
Felisha Carénage’s installation is mounted across the façades of KW’s front house and Kunst Raum Mitte, haunting—or Jumbie-ing, like the stilted ghostly figures in the Caribbean Carnival—Berlin Mitte’s buildings and streets. Marigold-dusted latex cutouts reference various cultures of mourning, the “living death” of intimate-partner terrorism, and independence in postcolonial womanhood as shaped by the death of Princess Diana—an event that for many Caribbean women signaled how freedom under empire, even in its alleged aftermath, was deadly. Strung-up sneakers mark the death of a young person and, in this work, also signal the appearance of a Moko Jumbie, which will materialize on January 11, 2026, as part of a public performance.
A 2007 iPod Nano loaded with mp3s, self-produced videos and album art revisits the songs Choucoune and Yellow Bird, and becomes an object through which the past haunts the present. Along with the Queen Conch shell, it signals towards both resistance and the distortion of cultural memory.
Felisha Carénage (b. 1986, TT) is a Berlin and London based artist from Trinidad & Tobago. In her work, Carénage uses performance and expanded painting to explore ethics of empire, wrecking gender, race, language and nationhood through play, noise, the bacchanal and the carnivalesque. Recent and upcoming commissions include Dekoloniale, Berlin, Germany (2024), The Racial Imaginary Institute / daadgalerie, Berlin, Germany (2025), and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2026).
Will Fredo
In 1835, Afro-Brazilian Muslim abolitionist Manuel Calafate co-organized the Malês revolt, the largest uprising led by enslaved people in Brazil. Though unsuccessful, many fled to Bahia’s forests, where they formed self-governing communities known as maroon societies, palenques or quilombos. These groups, which existed across Latin America, often united Black, Indigenous, and at times poor white people in resistance to oppression.
For Imperfect Lovers: A Ritual for Johann Hammes, Will Fredo and three fellow artists perform a speculative ritual that invites Johann Hammes, a German metalworker who resisted the Third Reich, into this lineage. Filmed in the Murellenberg forest where he was executed eighty years earlier, the performance draws on maroon concepts including camouflage, opacity, and circular time.
The machete, both a tool and symbol of maroonage, bears the imprints of the lips of Calafate and of Hammes. It reflects the power and danger of speaking truth to authority while employing memory as a living technology that brings forward alliances once considered impossible.
Will Fredo (b. 1985, PT) is a Portuguese-German artist of Guatemalan and Cabo Verdean descent. Guided by Indigenous queer ecology and the Black radical tradition, Fredo develops collective projects that intersect storytelling and philosophy.
Alfonso Bueno Lima is a Uruguayan performer, dancer, and multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin.
Rebecca Pokua Korang is a German-Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist and cultural educator based in Berlin. Her work explores the complexities of identity and history.
Tere Stout is a post-discipline research artist whose work spans sound, belles-lettres and performance. Their work concerns cultural consumption, technological development, sound politics and their entanglements.
Tra My Ngyuen
She Who Moves is a short road movie exploring movement as a vehicle for physical and psychic transformation. Filmed in Vietnam, it follows a solitary motorcyclist drifting through dreamlike landscapes where memory, identity, and landscape blur. At a well, the protagonist sheds one self and gains another—a second skin announcing her metamorphosis.
And as I lurch forward into departure,
I can have no fear of the unknown,
for I, too, am the unknown to whatever heads towards me.
There has always been she who waits and weeps. But now, there is also she who moves.
– Sofia Thiu D’Amico on Tra My Nguyen (BPA// Exhibition 2025 publication)
Tra My Nguyen (b.1992, VN) is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist working with sculpture, textiles, and moving image. Her practice recontextualizes material culture through a diasporic lens, examining how bodily entanglements navigate power structures through agency and transformation. In speculative narratives, Nguyen investigates embodiment and commodification within globalized systems. Her recent exhibitions, all in 2025, include MUNTREF Museo de Artes Visuales, Buenos Aires, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, and NARS Foundation, New York.
Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju
The Wishing Well reframes the birch as a vessel shaped by cultural projection, personal memory, and ecological change. Once tied to European ideals of purity, fertility, beauty and the pastoral body, the birch becomes a porous, hybrid presence marked by entanglement and multiplicity. Hollow forms are wrapped in bark, its layered skins interrupted by burn marks, graphite, and pigment—signs and gestures that hover between inscription and erasure.
The work asks how materials hold desire, identity, and inherited narratives, while remaining in flux. A nearby tree stump is transformed into a mancala board, recalling a childhood game the artist loved. Ilupeju’s leather paintings Spraying and Vows extend this inquiry into skin as a membrane between subject and society, reflecting on family rituals like weddings, where tenderness and transaction often coexist.
Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju (b. 1996, US) is a Nigerian-American artist and writer based in Berlin. Working across painting, writing, performance, and installation, she explores intimacy, violence, healing, and cultural distortion. She studied Studio Art and Social & Cultural Analysis at NYU and painting at Skowhegan. Recent projects include her solo exhibition BloodLetter at Kestner Gesellschaft (2024) and The Wishing Well at Art Basel: Statements (2025).
Stanton Taylor
Stanton Taylor’s presentation takes its cue from the Art Workers Coalition’s eponymous 1969 anti-war poster protesting US intervention in Vietnam. In his 21st-century adaptation, Taylor sets art-historical iconography against contemporary news, casting a sidelong glance at the contradictions that underpin how Western states deploy the figure of the child and associated ideas of innocence.
Stanton Taylor (b. 1990, TT) is an artist and writer based in Berlin. Working across photography and installation, he engages histories of exhibition-making and display to question constructions of the human, as well as the omissions they entail. Together with his collaborator Tobias Hohn, he has recently exhibited at Bonner Kunstverein (2025); Galerie Khoshbakht, New York (2025); Baader- Meinhof, Omaha (2024); Sweetwater, Berlin (2024); Lore Deutz, Cologne (2024); and Scherben, Berlin (2024). In the spring of 2026, Hohn and Taylor will present a solo show at Galerie Max Mayer, Berlin.
Rexy Tseng
Rexy Tseng’s installation The End Effector features a robotic arm mounted on a platform of solar panels, waving a white flag as a gesture of defeat. Inspired by Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, Rexy Tseng reimagines the scene of collective survival as a meditation on technology, climate crisis, and the ethics of futurity, reflecting a shift from the past decade’s optimism for communication technology, clean energy, and space exploration toward political polarization, economic uncertainty, and deepening mistrust. Early enthusiasm for engineering has given way to anxieties over automation, job loss, and rising inflation, evoking the motif of a shipwreck—a raft adrift with abandoned hope.
The painting Parliamentary Brawl Before a Storm combines a parliamentary brawl and an inverted photograph of a typhoon, both from Taiwan. The brawl reflects heated disputes in the legislative hall, while the storm underscores governmental unpreparedness and recurring vulnerabilities in provincial infrastructure.
Rexy Tseng (b. 1986, TW) is a Berlin-based artist working with painting and installation. Recent solo exhibitions include Magenta Plains, New York, USA and the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan, Armenia (both 2025); Uitstalling, Gent, Belgium (2023), and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan (2022).
Prateek Vijan
Prateek Vijan’s installation This object is temporarily removed from display centers on the museum guard’s uniform as a point where colonial histories of extraction meet their legacies in a present shaped by labor migration and precarious work. A uniform materializes an institutional contract between employer and employee—granting authority and enforcing discipline in exchange for wages. Drawing from standardized uniforms in major Western museums, reconfiguring them with altered volumes that disrupt the visual codes of neutrality tied to museum staff, Vijan’s work highlights how those whose job it is to protect collections often come from regions whose objects were seized in the course of imperial expansion. Worn daily by the guards at both KW’s front house and Kunst Raum Mitte, Vijan’s uniforms operate as both sculpture and ritualized performance, exposing the museum as a site where colonial afterlives persist while reconfiguring the metrics of institutional structures and behavioral codes.
Prateek Vijan (b. 1991, IN) is an artist based in Berlin. His work traces how systems of ownership, preservation, and cultural value carry the residues of colonial power. He presented a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Hamburg and exhibited at MGK Siegen. Vijan received the Ars-Viva Prize 2026 and the Berenberg Culture Prize 2025. Upcoming shows include the Marta Herford Museum (2026) and Kunstverein Braunschweig (2026).
Hana Yoo
Starting from a study on female frogs feigning death to avoid mating, Hana Yoo’s new video work I Came
for the Flowers traces how generational memories of systemic violence against female bodies linger within women across time. Interlacing the visual aesthetics of 1990s–2000s South Korea, archival footage of “comfort women” from the 1940s, and personal intimate recordings, Yoo’s work reflects on the gendered concept of passivity and reimagines “playing dead” as a dreamlike, suspended state in which resistance manifests not only through confrontation, but through stillness, humor, and the fragile instinct to survive.
The neon work Nightmare (악몽 written vertically in Korean) recalls the glow of storefront signage from South Korea in the 1960s, when mass sex tourism emerged during rapid postwar development, capturing the transition from military violence to the violence of capital.
Hana Yoo (b. 1987, KR) is a Berlin based multidisciplinary artist working with video and installation. Her research-driven practice explores collective anxiety, transcendental experience, and processes of Othering through parodic storytelling that challenges psychopolitical structures. Recent commissions include the 38th transmediale at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Sungkok Art Museum x Busan Museum of Art (2025). She won the Berlin Art Prize (2022) and is a current Junge Akademie fellow at Akademie der Künste.
Julija Zaharijević
Zaharijević’s Landmines present realistic, large-scale oil paintings of landmines as seen from above. Initially perceived as abstract forms, their figurative realism gradually reveals the object itself, oscillating between its representation and the disclosure of its ornamental nucleus, exposing the tension between visual allure and the latent threat the object embodies.
The compositions deliberately avoid a defined visual center, challenging the notion of linear perspective and ratio in classical painting, where a focal point traditionally structured pictorial space and guided the viewer’s gaze by imparting order and hierarchy to the image. Here, its absence functions as an open void, destabilizing perception towards uncertainty, and drawing attention to the material presence and effects of the invisible but ubiquitous agents of warfare.
Julija Zaharijević (b. 1991, RS) is an artist based in Berlin and Vienna whose practice explores the symbolic value of objects and how their visual form shapes their meaning and canonization. She selects motifs with a dissonance between the conceptual significance of an object and its appearance, questioning notions of reality, power, and the aftermath of the Western modernist discourse. Recent shows include Thriller, Autokomanda, Belgrade (2025), Soggiorno, Noah Klink hosted by Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2025). Upcoming solo exhibition Medium P, Berlin (2026).
