(A thought spiral)

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At some point,  s t o r y  became  h i s t o r y.

Text had much to do with this development. We wrote down what we observed, fixing things in time in order to measure and assess them. We wrote books of all kinds. We read, revised, and built upon them, writing new books in turn. A straight line emerged, connecting past to present and propelling humanity into the future. We called it progress.

Before history, time was less a line than a circle, or rather, a spiral. Life was anchored in cycles of growth and decay, marked by the seasons and the phases of the moon.

What if we are returning to the spiral?

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(Inhale for a count of three
Exhale for a count of six—)

A Spiral, a Mouth, a Horn and a Halo foregrounds forms of meaning-making that are mutable, relational, and recursive. Oral forms–myths, fairy tales, fables, and songs–are optimised for intergenerational transmission, relying on affective resonance and a capacity to forge connections between people. Over the last decades, fast-paced innovations in communication media and digital technologies have transformed how we relate to knowledge and truth, to the point that a shared reality can no longer be assumed. Those in power today know that the pull of a compelling story outweighs the authority of fact. The stakes are no longer only what is true, but how reality itself is narrated, and by whom. A Spiral, a Mouth, a Horn and a Halo takes this instability as a point of departure. The exhibition considers how digital life reshapes our relationship to the past, now accessible as a vast, flattened archive, and explores the limits of language, memory, and communication under contemporary conditions. How can art mobilise storytelling as a tool for thinking about the present?

The sound piece Dornröschens Staub (Sleeping Beauty’s Dust) is written by Olga Hohmann and composed by Yannick Wittmann. Moving between song, spoken word, and breath, the piece is structured by a breathing rhythm used to calm the nervous system: inhaling for a count of three and exhaling for a count of six. Hohmann’s text takes inspiration from a remark by Georges Bataille, who points out a curious omission in the classic fairy tale: upon waking from her hundred-year sleep, Sleeping Beauty would be covered in dust. Made largely of shed skin cells, this dust consists of traces of her past selves. Since the cells in our bodies constantly die and are replaced, we are, in this sense, ever-changing beings. The notion of a fixed, enduring self, foundational to Western thought, is softened by recognising the body as a continuous process of becoming and passing away. Hohmann’s voice loops and overlaps in a polyphonic inner dialogue. Linking bodily cycles–cellular renewal, sleep and wakefulness–to those of time itself, she cites Mark Twain: “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

In This broken city sky like butane on my skin, Shuang Li magnifies a smartphone case to monumental scale. Wall-mounted and cast in iridescent gasoline-pink, the imposing object reads as a shrine: a protective frame meant for devotion. A vertical indentation runs through the centre of the surface decorated with star and moon motifs. It is crossed by hollow oval shapes, saint-less halos. This vertical line recalls a magic wand or an antenna, forms associated with transmission and connection. A second large-scale sculpture by Li, installed on the floor, takes the form of a massive maroon seashell with a glossy metallic finish. Studded with cartoonish spines and decorated with squiggle shapes it references anime aesthetics that shaped the artist’s childhood visual world. Both works were developed during the same period, when Li arrived in Berlin shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic and was unable to return home to China. In this context, the phone case and the seashell function as parallel figures of housing and protection.

In Wie-yi T. Lauw’s large hand woven tapestry, Fleeting Universe, anachronistic juxtapositions take centre stage. Digital interfaces, anime and video-game imagery, and references to art history coexist without hierarchy, woven into a single flattened pictorial field. In the centre, we see a screen displaying an architectural modelling program. A manga-style female warrior stands alongside a dragon, while two disembodied hands hover, one robotic, the other a reference to classical sculpture. The work draws from the artist’s own multicultural heritage, shaped by migration while also reflecting the experience of being online today, a condition of total archival access in which fragments of global history, popular culture, and personal memory circulate side by side.

Annabel Daou’s The Last Word is a vertically suspended wall piece made of countless, meticulously cut layers of paper, each bearing the sentence: “OUR SKIN LAID BARE AND OUR EYES BEARING WITNESS.” The phrase comes from a response Daou received to the question, “What’s left of us?” Repetition is central to the artist’s practice, a ritual that adds weight and lets meaning sink in. However, here, meaning is partially obscured through repetition. As the sentence descends, the overlapping strips fall unevenly, blurring the text and making it increasingly difficult to read. Rendered in white on a white wall, the work is deliberately subdued. The phrase evokes the bodily act of bearing witness, rooted in seeing and sensing. It underscores the limits of perception and the challenge of rendering experience communicable in a world where even what we observe with our own eyes is routinely questioned.

Elisa Giardina Papa’s presents two white ceramic sculptures shaped like thick, rope-like braids, part of her project “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale. One braid emerges from the wall through a circular opening, while the other rests on a metal armature. The works draw on the Sicilian myth of the donne di fora: supernatural female figures who embodied contradictory qualities; benevolent and vengeful, human and otherworldly, feminine and masculine. The project combines folklore and archival research, drawing on songs and stories passed down by the artist’s grandmother alongside sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Inquisition records documenting the persecution of women accused of being donne di fora. Presented alongside a poem by Megan Fernandes that adopts the language of fairy-tales, the works foreground forms of knowledge that have been marginalised, disqualified, or rendered illegible by dominant systems of order.

Bethan Hughes’s installation, features hand-cast rubber boots as well as tall, tool-like metal spears. The objects lean casually against the wall, as if recently used in the field. A print nearby shows a dandelion, Taraxacum koksaghyz, the Kazakh rubber-producing dandelion, filtered through orange glass. Part of the series Outfit for a Woman in a Field, the installation belongs to Hughes’s long-term project Hevea, which traces the movement of the plant across contexts—from the Soviet Union to Nazi-occupied Poland, Germany, and the United States. Drawing on letters, telegrams, scientific records, and oral histories, Hughes reconstructs the overlooked stories of women who planted these dandelions during World War II, examining how their lives became entangled with the plant’s biological cycles and the demands of the military-industrial complex.