Interconnected Gestures

How can a place be understood through artistic practice? 'Interconnected Gestures' brings together six artists whose works explore how spaces are perceived, interpreted, and inhabited. The exhibition considers how artists engage with place through materials, everyday rhythms, and histories. Rather than emphasizing grand narratives or finished forms, the show turns its attention to what is always in process— spaces and systems that hum quietly: a suspended belt carrying the language of support and weight, a borrowed scaffolding pole temporarily removed from use, a glass composition still open to arrangement, a painted sky interrupted by wavering lines, an empty digital corridor caught in repetition and a distant radio telescope holding the atmosphere of a former political system. The artists come from different backgrounds, visual contexts and practices, yet share an attentiveness to what places hold and reveal. Through their works, overlooked areas, traces, and forms of connection come into focus. New site-responsive works by Mara Kirchberg, Ioanna Mitza, and Marina Stanimirović accentuate this framework of hidden infrastructures by looking to the environs of Weißensee as a point of departure for broader reflections. Works by Vanessa Disler, Indrė Rybakovaitė, and Thai May Nguyen extend these concerns through painterly, architectural, and historical approaches. Ioanna Mitza explores the intersection of personal and public experiences in urban space. Her practice focuses on collective environments shaped by labor, infrastructure, and systems of visibility, with a particular emphasis on construction sites. For this exhibition, Mitza creates a site-responsive installation using galvanized steel poles borrowed from active construction sites near Neun Kelche. Temporarily removed from their functional context, the materials are rearranged into a sculptural edifice before returning to their intended use. A bow, reflective fabric, and a covered street sign shift the language of safety and construction: materials used to guide, protect, or warn become decorative, tactile, and personal. The compositions draw inspiration from the visual language of construction sites, as well as the creativity and craftsmanship of the workers whose labor often remains hidden behind functionality and robust materials. During the exhibition, visitors are invited to add stickers designed by Mitza to the arrangement of steel poles, allowing the work to change over time through acts of participation. Borrowing from the language of construction signage, the stickers recall the markings and informal interventions that accumulate in public spaces. It gathers traces of those who encounter it, remaining open and malleable through both its borrowed materials and the contributions of visitors. Mara Kirchberg is a visual artist whose installations often concern the hidden interiors of bodies and machines, revealing the systems that both support and strain them. Using industrial material, she constructs hybrid systems shaped by contact, vulnerability, and attachment. Kirchberg’s installation 'Load Capacity — 1150kg' centers on a woven wheel net. Suspended from the ceiling it forms a cradle-like structure just out of reach. The piece is made from lifting belts used in logistics and construction to secure heavy loads. It shifts an industrial vocabulary of tension, restraint, and load-bearing into an intimate register. The belts extend towards the floor, where their sewn labels—usually used for safety instructions and technical specifications—carry a text written by the artist. Moving between bodily description and technical language, this text treats weight as something held in the body, passed between people, and carried over time. The work asks what it means to carry and be carried, to hold and be held. Kirchberg transforms a system designed to secure cargo into a web of dependency and care. During the exhibition, the installation will be activated through the performative reading 'These Arms Could Lift Cars'. Marina Stanimirović is a Berlin-based multimedia artist whose installations bring together sculpture, photography, and found materials into multilayered compositions. Working with found and fabricated objects, she displaces everyday materials from their usual functions. She reassembles them into fragile or dysfunctional configurations that move between familiarity and strangeness, intimacy and shared experiences. For this exhibition, Stanimirović presents an installation composed of cut glass panels, photographs, and found materials. The glass elements are connected and arranged into loose, precarious arrangements that recall fragments of temporary enclosures, walls, or windows. Their surfaces carry visible traces of production—paint, scraped areas, marks, and partial opacity—while photographs and objects are placed around them like traces of a personal archive. The work reflects on the fragile frameworks through which private and social structures are organized: homes, routines, memories, inherited objects, and social supports. By allowing the material process to remain visible, Stanimirović treats the act of constructing the piece as part of the work’s narrative. Vanessa Disler is a painter and sculptor based in Berlin whose practice moves between abstraction and figuration. Her large-scale canvases and sculptures explore the porous boundaries between private memory and shared experiences, between inner life and the external forms around it. Disler’s studio is located in the same building as Neun Kelche and 'Here on Earth' emerges from an artistic practice shaped by the immediate surroundings of Weißensee. In the painting, gentle, sweeping forms and lineated interruptions suggest something both intimate and restrictive. It evokes creased bed sheets, folds of fabric, or traces left by a resting body. At the same time, its grid-like lines recall barriers, chain-link fences rendered as soft and flowing. What first appears domestic and personal begins to shift toward the visual language of the city: its divisions, edges, and enclosures. Thai May Nguyen is a Berlin-based visual artist working with drawing and video. In her single-channel video installation 'Dead Spaces', Nguyen turns her attention to neglected urban areas. In a silent video loop, she constructs vague virtual environments in which lonely, cartoon-like figures drift through abandoned passages, fenced-off corners, and empty mall-like interiors. Their repetitive movement gives the work a suspended, dreamlike quality, as if the spaces were caught between memory, decay, and simulation. A central tension in the work lies in the contrast between emptiness and illumination. While the environments appear deserted and withdrawn, certain figures, signs, and architectural elements continue to glow. These luminous fragments animate the spaces without fully bringing them back to life, suggesting traces of activity that continue to linger. Through this interplay of stillness, repetition, and light, 'Dead Spaces' explores urban alienation while asking how cities are shaped not only by what is built and activated, but also by what is left behind and continues to linger. Indrė Rybakovaitė is a painter whose practice is rooted in psychogeography, spatial memory, and the emotional afterlife of places. Through field visits and research, she is drawn to sites marked by historical rupture and quiet transformation, translating spatial experience into paintings that unfold through atmosphere rather than specific events. In 'Radio Telescope in Irbene', Rybakovaitė depicts the former Soviet radio-intelligence complex in Irbene, Latvia: a site founded during the Soviet period as a secret military communications center and later transformed into a scientific observatory, with much of its surrounding settlement left in ruins. Set against dense clouds and a dim, muted landscape, the telescope appears both monumental and isolated. The painting approaches the site not as documentary fact, but as a psychological landscape—held between past and present functions, distant, and faintly threatening. The work enters into dialogue with the nearby GDR watchtower in Weißensee, a former Stasi security apparatus. Though different in form and scale, both sites originate from systems of surveillance and control, and remain to this day as fragments of these histories. Rybakovaitė reflects on how such architectures continue to shape the perception of a place, not through direct narratives, but through their presence, distance, and the quiet tension they carry. With heartfelt thanks to all those involved: Samuel Hertz, Adomas Rybakovas, Valerian Blos, Yip Stals, Eva Dittrich, Helia Jafarzadeh, Niels Matitawaer, Jeroen Schrijver, Saeio Mitza Matitawaer, ZURRPACK GmbH, Ralf Pflugfelder