It would seem like Berlin has perfected the aesthetics of aftermath. Not only because of the exposed concrete and abandoned infrastructure, but through a cultural logic based on the strategic preservation of ruination. What gives the city its edge is no longer just the existence of ruins, but the monetisation of their atmosphere. But using ruins as currency also hollows their critical force, turning what once signalled rupture into a portable style that can be bought and sold at will.
It is within this logic that HOUSE stages its second chapter, Gravity Ease Contract, curated by David Douard at Halle am Berghain — an exhibition embedded within a structure that has itself become synonymous with the city’s capacity to transform industrial residue into cultural mythology.
Berlin has become increasingly associated with converting precarity, from unemployment to interior architecture, into aesthetic capital. Unfinished walls, exposed pipes, and suspended renovations do not read as instability here; they accrue value as proof of authenticity. Apartments whose renovations appear permanently suspended are permitted precisely because they perform a certain curated ideal: the fantasy of the intentionally unfinished life.
The exhibition inhabits that logic and turns it inward.
Upon entering the space, the darkness of the Halle produces immediate disorientation; one struggles to separate bodies, walls, and objects from the imposing concrete mass. Gradually, however, the space begins to appear brighter as the eyes adjust. Vision recalibrates to diminished conditions, and opacity resolves in fragments. With that adaptation, shapes separate, some edges return, and what was opaque becomes translucent. This is the show’s operating logic. Gravity Ease Contract is built on latency: clarity that arrives slowly, through adjustment rather than sudden reveal, mirroring a city in which historical breaks endure as broader temporal logic that require continual acts of psychic adjustment and recalibration.
Like a beacon in the darkness, Erwan Sene’s The Ball (& Satellites) centres on a gleaming stainless-steel sphere orbited by an constellation of clay, black silicone tubing, wood, plastic, and scavenged fragments. The installation divides the room sonically as much as physically. Up close, it emits anxious mechanical sounds: beeps, scans, diagnostic hums that evoke the sterile vigilance of medical technology. Across the space, speakers periodically emit hymn-like voices whose warmth feels almost impossibly human against the cold precision of the machinery.
Clinical pulses and choral breath take turns, collapsing the distance between the most natural and the most artificial sensations of being alive. The work feels like a life cycle translated into sound: on one side, the antiseptic alert of a monitor; on the other, a voice that could belong equally to a first lullaby or a final benediction. Rather than imposing a fixed narrative, Sene stages the one we continuously construct for ourselves, that between birth and death, our machines, rituals, and songs are all attempts to make coherence out of existence.
In the next “room,” Julia Scher’s Mama Bed is flat-out creepy. Four steel poles frame a low, wired “bed” fitted with cameras, monitors, microphones, and exposed cabling; on the bed are children’s fairy-tale books — Goldilocks and the Three Bears — beside a leather whip. Safety and discipline uncomfortably paired. As you step closer, a monitor throws back your live image, pulling the viewer into the system they thought they were only looking at. That instant of seeing one’s self captured — unflattering, immediate, inescapable — is uncomfortable to put it mildly: you’re already inside the apparatus and it was not really consensual. The work turns refuge into a regulated zone, where comfort is performed as compliance and belonging is learned by watching your own surveillance.
A freestanding work by Akeem Smith comprises a pair of speakers that would have played recordings of women screaming in Gaza; in the exhibition, the speakers have been explicitly unplugged. Sound is removed but not its presence. What remains is silence where protest once was. The piece makes that silence visible as part of the installation itself. It describes a condition of the present in which images and recordings of war circulate constantly, but the force of those cries no longer produces reaction at the level of politics or collective response. Instead, they accumulate as traces we continue to encounter without being able to process them into action or change.
In the centre of the space, a sort of domestic interior architecture has been erected, which provides wall space but also gives refuge within Halle’s cavernous expanse. The exhibition’s curatorial text describes works encountered “through the cracks” of private rooms, where music, video, and fragments of popular culture seep into domestic space. The crack is a governing metaphor: a compromised membrane through which reality intrudes in dispersed and unstable forms.
The exhibition would not carry the same weight in another space. Berghain is one of Berlin’s most symbolically loaded buildings, compressing industrial production, subcultural myth, and cultural commodification into a single shell. Built to power the monumentalism of Stalinallee, it later became a mythic techno institution. Today it persists as both pseudo-ruin and machine; a place where bodies rehearse collective intensity under depleted conditions. Its image is exported as a set of codes: darkness, hardness, anonymity, even the ritual of getting rejection at the door. Gravity Ease Contract plays to this afterlife and uses its pressure as a material.
Rather than posing the site as a picturesque ruin, the exhibition inhabits the unstable ways of seeing that come from living among its remnants. It captures a contemporary mood in which politics circulates like spent weather, endlessly transmitted, half-processed, and rarely brought fully into view.
The curatorial language of “chimeras, creatures, and avatars” describes forms of political subjectivity shaped through deformation. Identity appears distributed across doubles, ventriloquised selves, and unstable proxies; embodiment is no longer fixed to a single position but split across multiple versions of itself. This resonates with Donna Haraway’s cyborg ontology and Legacy Russell’s account of the glitch as a site where identity breaks and reassembles under pressure. Bodies are described as “heavy with gravity, moving toward equilibrium,” registering transformation as process rather than event—compression, delay, ongoing strain.
Within this condition, a post-screaming world is exposed, marked by repeated exposure to violence, from Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine. Political events do not resolve; they pile up as one outperforms the next. What shifts is their processing. Witnessing continues, but it no longer reliably organises nor or needs response. Urgency circulates without consolidation into action, and affect thins out as it moves. The outcome is a dense and more corrosive saturation in which attention and fatigue become the primary media through which political reality is felt.
This is also the condition the exhibition makes explicit: there is no position of withdrawal from aesthetics or perception that is not already part of political structure. Silence, refusal, and absence are not outside circulation; they are forms within it and shaped by it. Being unpolitical, a-political, or neutral is not a thing, and these are only dressed up words for complacence.
Inside this condition, the exhibition makes an important point about attention and perception. You don’t see more because the light changes; you see more because you adjust. In the exhibition, darkness makes your eyes recalibrate, and shapes slowly separate even though the lighting stays the same. Political perception works like that too: events come into view gradually, not all at once. Sound, images, and testimony hit with uneven force: some loud, some faint, so they don’t add up to a single shared picture.
This isn’t numbness but overloaded attention: feeling persists, just split into fragments. Franco Berardi describes this as a collapse of nervous bandwidth under informational overload; here it appears as a state in which affect persists across fragmented cognitive thresholds.
The exhibition title names the show’s tension and keeps it painfully and realistically unresolved. Gravity is weight, pull, collapse; ease is release, drift, (brief) relief; contract is both pact and constraint. None cancel out the other. The works sit in that friction, suspended between breakdown and adaptation. HOUSE frames them as nests, refuges, thresholds, and provisional interiors — shelters that never fully close. They remain porous, and the outside keeps leaking in.
This porosity speaks to Berlin of today, where the myth of autonomous counterculture collides with gentrification, securitisation, and the institutionalisation of nightlife. The exhibition text ends with “a latent presence in the midst of transformation.” Latency here is not a void or a pause; it’s a charged interval — like a psychoanalytic suspension and a technical delay: time thickened under pressure, transmission slowed but not stopped. Gravity Ease Contract binds these senses together: response is fractured and fatigued, yet subterranean changes keep gathering force. Immersion is the wrong promise. You don’t melt into a seamless environment; you move through partial signals and stalled energies. The exhibition becomes a choreography of latency — an ongoing oscillation between numbness and mutation, silence and interference, ruin and emergence.
What happens inside Halle is therefore not simply an exhibition about collapse, but one attuned to mutations within the event of collapse itself. Amid concrete walls built for another ideological era, these dormant figures, fractured signals, and exhausted interiors begin to feel less like representations of political paralysis than symptoms of a world still reorganising itself in the dark.
Founded in 2023, HOUSE is a nomadic platform for artistic production activating architecturally and historically charged spaces.
Featured artists:
Nils Alex-Tabeling
Emmanuel Beguinot
Ellen Cantor
Dennis Cooper
Stephan Dillemuth
Rochelle Goldberg
Angela Hampel
Estelle Hanania
Richard Hawkins
Agata Ingarden
Mélanie Matranga
Rafael Moreno
Jean-Luc Moulène
Rolf Nowotny
Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel
Susan Philipsz
Julia Scher
Erwan Sene
Akeem Smith
Naoki Sutter-Shudo
Celeste Burlina (scenography)
