Sea turtles live almost exclusively in the water — an ecological subversion that clashes with a culture built on display in a world that puts everything under lights. For most of their 100+ years lives, they drift through buoyant currents, unseen and, frankly, uninterested in us.
Then, for a handful of nights each year, they crawl onto land to lay eggs before dragging themselves back toward the sea, heavy with gravity and often bad timing. It is during this brief window of vulnerability that humans finally get to have a look. We show up with cameras, clipboards, and the urge to help. These few hours on sand expose what the ocean usually hides, reminding us that even the oldest biological routines now occur inside of human-controlled frames.
In What if … forever at SEXAUER, Alexander Iskin turns this fragile interval into painterly substance. His time in Mexico City and Mazunte, volunteering at the Centro Mexicano de la Tortuga, placed him under full moons as thousands of hatchlings advanced toward the Pacific in fragile, erratic lines. He observed turtles mating, laying eggs, hatching, crawling, and dying.
The exercise feels ready-made for metaphor: studio meets surf, brush meets shell…it is the kind of biography curators dream about. The Global South has long functioned as a projection screen for European depth-seeking, a terrain where “nature” is recruited as accomplice to aesthetic revelation. The risk of exoticism is real: the turtle as motif, the beach as backdrop, the volunteer as narrator of transcendence.
However, the exhibition text resists the touristic snapshot with surprising thoroughness. It insists on effort and compassion through an almost encyclopaedic account of turtle life, and refuses any easy sentiment. This energy was echoed by the crowd itself on opening night, which appeared distinctly artistic but also unusually warm. There was little of the brittle performativity that is characteristic of openings nearer Berlin Mitte. Being in Weißensee already seemed to recalibrate the atmosphere and the space felt buffered from the velocity of “Berlin proper”, tucked into a sympathetic corner where things could unfold in their own time.
Once the official art opening ended, the gallery no longer felt like a gallery. Someone fired up a fog machine. Burritos and mezcal appeared out of nowhere, distributed with improbable generosity. The paintings stayed where they were, but the room shifted. The space, already charged by the weight of the turtles’ time and effort, now felt alive with human energy — a reminder that care and attention are not abstract ideals. They are lived, performed, and shared. The setting felt like a modest form of protection, like a haven that mirrored the exhibition’s own logic: presence instead of postcard wonder.
In a way, this human vitality mirrored the labour of the turtles themselves. Built for buoyancy, the turtles suffer on land. Their weight increases the moment they leave water, and each step becomes an act of immense strain and effort. Once they arrive, soldiers appear and armed guards line the beach, standing watch over a process that used to unfold without witnesses.
The fact that armed protection is required for a reproductive ritual that predates human history underscores the fraughtness in the tension between survival and human intervention. Turtle survival now depends on negotiation with authorities as much as on instinct. Playa Escobilla becomes a refuge and a checkpoint: a zone where biology is processed through administration.
Iskin’s paintings capture this tension through abstraction. The idea of wilderness is completely fractured, which is echoed in the broken gestures and dramatic crests of the artist’s strokes. From a distance, the figures and their backgrounds read as fields of colour and gesture, but as you approach, forms vanish into brushstrokes, dissolving into movement and pressure.
The body of the animal becomes inseparable from the body of the mark; the struggle, the weight, the passage from water to land is translated into colour, texture, and rhythm. You want to get closer to see the creatures, but the closer you get, the more they slip back into paint, leaving only the sense of effort, endurance, and precarious survival. This is where the paintings start to make sense. Iskin does not paint turtles; he paints pressure. The sea becomes something you feel rather than see. The brush drags the way a body drags itself out of weightlessness into gravity.
Having gained access to a protected site, Iskin persuaded soldiers to let him in at night, and returned to Berlin with paintings. It begs the question: who has the right to witness, and who transforms witnessing into culture? These questions linger, even if the story is sincere. The site itself harbours its own tensions, as the sanctuary occupies the ruins of a slaughterhouse where tens of thousands of turtles were once killed each year.
At least extraction has been replaced with care, but the past does not disappear, and our efforts, though earnest, cannot guarantee that every life is saved.
The awful truth is that one in a thousand hatchlings survives. Furthermore, their organs are full of plastic, light pollution confuses their already laboured navigation, and ships bruise their shells. And all of this happens under our watch — the same humans who provide military guards to protect them. Ancient reproductive rituals are now mediated by permits, flashlights, and watchful eyes in uniform.
At some point, I realised I was no longer thinking about turtles at all. I was thinking about thresholds: about how systems can announce care while rehearsing control, how sanctuaries take on the logic of borders, and how protection itself becomes a form of governance. Even our most conscientious interventions are partial; they do not guarantee survival, and in some ways, they remind us of how fragile life really is.
What if … forever does not sell optimism, though it may sell turtle paintings. Inside these paintings lies a question about turning survival into philosophy and beauty into a precarious resource. The turtles carry 120 million years inside their shells, and the exhibition quietly asks whether human attention can even register that kind of time — or whether it only knows how to grieve it.
Alexander Iskin: “What if” … forever
13.02 – 28.03.2026
SEXAUER Gallery
Streustraße 90, 13086 Berlin
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