OPENING OF THE LOOKING GLASS SELF | SAUT X CC

Circle Culture Gallery and SAUT present The Looking Glass Self, a group exhibition bringing together eight artistic positions across painting, sculpture, photography and installation. Opening alongside Berlin Art Week on 11 September 2026.

Circle Culture Gallery and SAUT warmly invite you to the opening of The Looking Glass Self, a group exhibition bringing together eight artistic positions across painting, sculpture, photography and installation.

SAUT, short for Space for Art & Underrepresented Talent, is an independent curatorial and production practice creating visibility and access for underrepresented talent within the contemporary art scene.

For its first exhibition, SAUT takes over the curatorial direction at Circle Culture Gallery, bringing its selection of emerging artists into dialogue with two established positions from our programme: Jeffrey Cheung and Marco Reichert. Together, the works extend SAUT’s questions around identity, touch, community and the act of looking across different practices, experiences and generations.

About the exhibition

The exhibition takes its title from the concept of the “looking glass self,” introduced by American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley in Human Nature and the Social Order in 1902.

The concept describes how individuals develop a sense of self through the act of being perceived. We imagine how we are seen, imagine how we are judged and form an emotional response to that imagined judgement.

The Looking Glass Self asks what happens when the self is not formed in isolation, but through the reflections it receives, anticipates or invents. Across painting, sculpture, photography and installation, the works explore how becoming visible, legible or available to interpretation exposes the self to projection, recognition, misrecognition and change.

The visitor is not placed outside this question. To look at the works is also to participate in the condition they describe and to become conscious of one’s own position as observer.

To look is not to stand at a distance. It is to become part of the reflection.

A curatorial exchange

SAUT steps into a programme that has spent twenty five years finding its own shape. What interested us was the idea of growing into a room together through a curious exchange: a new way of looking at works we thought we already knew.

Jeffrey Cheung’s Touches and Marco Reichert’s sculptures are familiar to us on paper. Placed inside SAUT’s questions about identity, touch, community and the viewer’s own act of looking, they become something new. They approach those questions from a different angle than SAUT’s own artists, and that is precisely the point. The works do not illustrate the concept, they extend it.

What interests us is what happens when different experiences meet inside the same frame, and how each side changes the way the other can be read. Independent, progressive and initially underrepresented practices have shaped the Circle Culture programme for twenty five years. SAUT gives us a reason to revisit that history with a little less certainty and to allow a genuinely new voice to enter it.