For Berlin Art Week, Circle Culture and SAUT brought their programmes together in a joint exhibition at our Berlin gallery. Alongside the works on view, performances and gatherings became part of the exhibition, culminating in a closing evening on 29 September.
The Looking Glass Self brought a new curatorial perspective into our Berlin gallery this September. For its first exhibition, SAUT, short for Space for Art & Underrepresented Talent, took the lead in developing a presentation around identity, intimacy and the experience of being seen. Its selection brought together Marta Camilo, Eight Fang, Lee Kern, Rita Temudo, Siyan Zhang and Zhiyuan Yang, alongside works by Jeffrey Cheung and Marco Reichert from the Circle Culture programme.
The title refers to the idea that our sense of self develops through how we imagine others perceive us. Across painting, sculpture, photography, moving image and installation, the exhibition approached that question through different experiences of visibility, belonging and estrangement. It also asked visitors to consider their own position: what do we bring to an image, a body or a gesture when we look at it?
For us, the collaboration was an opportunity to see familiar works through another curatorial perspective. Jeffrey Cheung’s Touches and Marco Reichert’s sculptures entered new relationships within SAUT’s selection, opening a conversation across different practices and generations. Giving an independent curatorial initiative space to develop its first exhibition also continued a commitment that has shaped Circle Culture from the beginning: making room for emerging voices and allowing them to influence the programme.
Live performance extended these questions into the gallery itself. On 20 September, Eight Fang presented On good terms, performed together with Shar Adams, with sound by Pablo Muñoz-Barragán and Rafael García Jaramillo. Working with the gallery’s architecture, the piece considered how bodies adapt to structures and conditions they did not create. The audience’s passage from outside the windows into the gallery formed part of the work, bringing questions of boundaries, access and orientation into a shared physical experience.
The closing finissage on 29 September brought visitors and artists together once more, with a performance by Rita Temudo and Marta Camilo. Alongside the works on view, these live encounters gave the exhibition a changing rhythm throughout September and made the gallery a place to gather as well as to look.
Thank you to the SAUT team, all participating artists, performers and sound artists, and everyone who spent time with the exhibition.