The KINDL – Center for Contemporary Art in Berlin is opening four new exhibitions in September: Cornelia Parker. Stolen Thunder (A Storm Gathering) (Kesselhaus), Phoebe Collings-James. The subtle rules the dense (Maschinenhaus M1), Cihad Caner. Demonst(e)rating the Untamable Monster (M1 VideoSpace), and The Rise and Fall of Erik Schmidt (Maschinenhaus M2).
Image above: Archivierte Tonaufnahme (Vinyl), Foto: Cornelia Parker.
Cornelia Parker: Stolen Thunder (A Storm Gathering)
Cornelia Parker understands violence and destruction as central moments in sculptural practice. In her sculptural and installation work, she combines deconstruction and redesign. She exposes everyday objects to forces that change their form and create new contexts of meaning. Her art is characterized by a playful approach to time and history; it is an art of translation, transformation, and allusion. This is evident, for example, in her well-known large-scale sculpture on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) (2016) refers both to the Bates Motel from Hitchcock’s classic film Psycho and to the red, traditional wooden house of rural America. The artist finds visual metaphors for the political, spiritual, and cultural state of our world—often with an apocalyptic undertone. Her works reveal connections to the unconscious, to violence and trauma, but also to our beliefs and desires.
A number of works illustrate this approach particularly impressively, such as the early work Cold Dark Matter. Exploded View (1991), for which she installed the debris of a garden shed blown up by the British Army—like a three-dimensional exploded view drawing—hanging from the ceiling around a single light source. This already reveals a practice frequently encountered in Parker’s work: collaboration with people outside the art world. Another example of Parker’s collaborations is Magna Carta (An Embroidery) (2015), a 13-meter-long embroidered version of the Wikipedia article on Magna Carta, the central document on English rule of law from 1215. Parker’s work was created in a collective process involving whistleblower Edward Snowden, journalist Julian Assange, sculptor Antony Gormley, musician Brian Eno, and author and feminist Germaine Greer, as well as inmates from 13 English prisons, members of the Embroiderer’s Guild, and students from a Roman Catholic girls’ school.
Cornelia Parker has created a site-specific, immersive installation for the monumental boiler house—a powerful fictional event with an immediate physical presence that evokes dark premonitions. Her installation Stolen Thunder (A Storm Gathering) was created in collaboration with composer Graeme Miller and is based on extensive research into weather phenomena and the media and cultural history of their recording and archiving. Parker activates the space through the use of an extensive sound and light installation. For this installation, she once again works with a central light source that, during dark phases, allows shadows to be cast on the wall by the presence of the audience, reminiscent of German expressionist film of the 1920s and, in particular, the German expressionist movement Der Sturm. In this way, Parker builds a bridge to the time when the Kindl Brewery was built and to the expressionist elements in the building’s architecture.
The concept of storms as a powerful metaphor has been frequently explored in literary and cinematic history—as a reflection of political instability, the unpredictable forces of nature, and the depths of the human psyche. In view of the increasing threat of climate disasters due to global warming on the one hand, and the fear of conflict due to dramatic shifts in political axes on the other, this work seems to me to be an idea whose time has come,” explains Cornelia Parker.
Cornelia Parker (born in Cheshire in 1956, lives in London) was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997. In 2010, she was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (followed by her appointment as Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2022). She was the first woman and also the first conceptual artist to be appointed as the UK’s official “election artist” for the 2017 general election; the works created in this context are part of the Parliamentary Art Collection. In 2023, Parker was commissioned by the British government’s art collection to create works to mark the coronation of King Charles III.
Solo exhibitions (selection): City Gallery of Wellington (in Preparation); Tate Britain, London (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2019); The Palace of Westminster, London (2018); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016); The Whitworth, Manchester (2015); Terrace Wires Commission, St. Pancras International Station, London (2015); British Library, London (2015, traveling exhibition: The Whitworth, Manchester; Bodleian Library, Oxford); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2014); MoMA, New York (2010); Reina Sofía, Madrid (2009); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2008, traveling exhibition: Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo; Fundación Pro Buenos Aires; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks, Istanbul; Kunsthaus Zürich; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2007, traveling exhibition: Museo de Arte de Lima).
Opening: Saturday, September 13, 2025, 6–9 pm
Exhibition dates: Sunday, September 14, 2025, to Sunday, May 24, 2026
Kesselhaus
Curator: Kathrin Becker
Phoebe Collings-James: The subtle rules the dense
Phoebe Collings-James is a multidisciplinary artist. Collings-James combines ceramics, drawing, text, and sound to create multi-layered works that address violence, desire, eroticism, and anti-colonial practices. KINDL presents Collings-James’ first institutional solo exhibition in Germany with ceramic sculptures and a sound piece created especially for the show.
Collings-James discovered ceramics in 2014 during a scholarship in Nove, northern Italy. She was immediately fascinated by the physical and metaphorical transformation of the material—from soft to hard, from malleable to durable—and began to incorporate ceramic forms into her performances and installations with increasing frequency. Today, clay is Collings-James’ preferred medium. The artist approaches the material with both a new urgency and a political and material openness. Collings-James rejects the separation between “fine art” and “craft” that prevails in the Western art context. Collings-James understands this distinction as part of a broader cultural system that has long separated and hierarchized knowledge, practices, and bodies, and in which questions of origin, class, gender, and access to education are embedded alongside colonial power relations.
The exhibition title The subtle rules the dense comes from a book about tarot and refers to a central motif in Collings-James’ artistic thinking: the relationship between visible and hidden forces, material density, and atmospheric charge. The artist also uses this title to refer to a series of hand-formed ceramic torsos. The richly decorated clay armour is inspired by West African body masks of the Yoruba or Makonde peoples, as well as by Roman armour that Collings-James discovered in an antique shop. At KINDL, one work from this series is shown as a freestanding sculpture, which shifts its effect: the flat, mask-like appearance thus develops a physical volume and a vital presence. For the first time in an exhibition, a ceramic torso enters into direct dialogue with the Infidels: with their long necks, wide-open mouths, and anthropomorphic features, these sculptures appear as hybrids between figures, vessels, and mythological beings. Their form is based on West African and Caribbean ceramic techniques for producing rolled vessels. The open mouths seem to scream or sing, their silent cries suggesting a quiet sonority that comes alive in the viewer’s imagination.
Unhörbare Töne beschwören auch die beiden Arbeiten a mouthpiece for Terry I und II (2025), ungebrannte Blöcke aus rotem Ton, die von Messingmundstücken von Blasinstrumenten durchbohrt sind – eine Hommage an den nordamerikanischen Künstler und Musiker Terry Adkins. Klang spielt in Collings-James‘ Praxis eine entscheidende Rolle. Die für die Ausstellung geschaffene Soundarbeit Elysium Fields Avenue (2025) verwebt Feldaufnahmen aus London und New Orleans mit weiteren klanglichen Passagen zu einer akustischen Komposition, die sich wie eine feine Klanglandschaft durch den Raum legt und die Skulpturen auf subtile Weise miteinander verbindet.
KINDL also features works from the ongoing series of Clay Paintings (blood line; ever new; a rose, a bridge, a house, 2025). The small-format panels bear engraved lines, symbols, and image fragments on their surfaces, which appear like fragments of dreams or excerpts from a private picture diary. In the bright yellow exhibition space, they create special accents and unfold on the walls like a dream sequence in which drawing and engraving combine with color and relief. This method of inscribing, reworking, and layering runs through Collings-James’ entire practice and forms a poetic foundation on which her works grow and continually evolve.
Phoebe Collings-James (born 1987 in London, lives in London) has performed and exhibited as a sound and performance artist at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Sonic Acts, Amsterdam (2019); Cafe Oto, London (2019); Borealis Festival, Bergen (2019); Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2018); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018). As part of the collective B.O.S.S. (Black Obsidian Sound System), Collings-James participated in the Liverpool Biennial in 2021 and was nominated for the Turner Prize. Collings-James founded the Mudbelly ceramics studio in London in 2019, which offers free ceramics classes for Black people taught by Black ceramists.
Solo exhibitions (selection): SculptureCenter, New York (2024); Camden Arts Centre, London (2021).
Group exhibitions (selection): Kunstverein Hamburg (2024); Foundling Museum, London (2024); Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2024); The Courtauld Gallery, London (2023); Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry (2023); High Art Arles (2022); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2021); FACT Liverpool (2019).
Opening: Saturday, September 13, 2025, 6–9 p.m.
Exhibition dates: Sunday, September 14, 2025, to Sunday, February 15, 2026
Maschinenhaus M1
Curator: Katherina Perlongo
Discourse program
October 29, 2025, 7:00 pm: Conversation between Katherina Perlongo and Phoebe Collings-James
October 30, 2025, 7:00 pm: Community session with Phoebe Collings-James at EOTO (Togostraße 76, 13351 Berlin) as part of the safer space event series for Black people and people of African descent, Who’s in Town.
November 12, 2025, 7:00 pm: Tour of the exhibition with Katherina Perlongo
Cihad Caner: Demonst(e)rating the Untamable Monster
In his artistic practice, Cihad Caner explores image politics using various media such as video, photography, music, motion capture, CGI, and installation. His research-based approach focuses on questions of representation, marginalization, and the construction of otherness. His works often feature multilingual characters who question the status quo in nonlinear, metaphorical narratives filled with humor, absurdity, and poetry.
In his video work Demonst(e)rating the Untamable Monster (2019) (Turkish with English subtitles, 16 min.), Caner focuses on the figure of the monster—as a metaphor for the “other.” Two animated figures, brought to life using motion capture technology, recount their experiences of exclusion. They sing, hum, and speak in a precise, rhythmic choreography about dehumanization and fear, about the right to speak—and about the fact that they cannot be made to disappear. The movements and voices come from three people—a woman, a queer person, and a migrant—and thus combine to form hybrid beings that cannot be clearly classified. The etymology of the term “monster” (monstrare—to show, monere—to warn) opens up a double interpretation: What do Caner’s monsters show—and what do they warn us about?
The work builds visual bridges between centuries and cultures: from the wonders of creation and the curiosities of existing things by the 13th-century Persian scholar al-Qazwīnī, to depictions of dancing monsters by Mehmed Siyah Qalam from the 14th/15th century, to the yōkai depictions by the 18th-century Japanese illustrator Toriyama Sekien. Caner thus makes the widespread ambivalence of the monstrous tangible—both terrifying and wonderful at the same time.
Sound is a central element of the video work: in addition to voices, the daf can also be heard, an instrument that already appears in Siyah Qalam’s illustrations.
With Demonst(e)rating the Untamable Monster, Caner succeeds in creating a powerful contemporary examination of “deviants,” the mechanisms of othering—that is, the strategies used to label people as “different” and exclude them—as well as the opposition to these mechanisms.
The exhibition is supported by the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Cihad Caner (born in Istanbul in 1990) lives and works in Rotterdam. From 2021 to 2023, he was a fellow at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Since January 2024, he has been a resident artist at WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels. Solo exhibitions (selection): 1646 Experimental Art Space, The Hague (2025); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2024). Group exhibitions (selection): Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2024); Istanbul Modern (2024); The Július Koller Society, Bratislava (2024); Kunsthal Mechelen, Belgium (2023); Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2022); The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki (2019); Kunstraum Nestroyhof, Vienna (2019); ARCUS Project, Moriya / Japan (2018); Istanbul Design Biennale (2018).
Opening: Saturday, September 13, 2025, 6–9 p.m.
Exhibition dates: Sunday, September 14, 2025, to Sunday, February 15, 2026
M1 VideoSpace
Curator: Katja Kynast
The Rise and Fall of Erik Schmidt
Erik Schmidt’s comprehensive retrospective brings together his well-known paintings with drawings, videos, performances, photographs, and collages from three decades. Organized into thematic chapters, the exhibition unfolds a complex, personal universe and, as a multifaceted self-portrait, addresses questions of (queer) identity, community, and individuality. In multi-layered overlaps, the artist’s sometimes brutal, often humorous view of norms and social orders is revealed.
Erik Schmidt’s working method is characterized by his ability to transcend the documentary approach and use photographs, magazines, or newspapers as the basis for his work. Between self-staging and self-dissolution, he creates a multi-layered network of narrative strands—with the body as a stage, everyday life as a backdrop, and the city as a resonance chamber. Since the late 1990s, Erik Schmidt has lived and worked in Berlin, a city whose tension between myth and reality is reflected in his work. His images and films depict urban spaces, intimate scenes, and social rituals. However, they do not document, but rather construct subjective perspectives in which the possibility of failure is always considered. Closeness and distance, surface and depth, desire and alienation—all of this comes to light in Schmidt’s visual worlds, which appear both direct and distant at the same time.
One section of the exhibition brings together magazines, posters, private photos, and memorabilia from the 1990s onwards, as well as paintings, drawings, and early videos, which come together to form a portrait that is both personal and collective. These early works mark the beginning of Schmidt’s search for autonomy, meaning in life, and sexual freedom—a search that he continues to this day. It is a journey in the sense of a literary quest that constantly presents the artist with new challenges.
In order to master these tasks in life as in art, Schmidt takes on a wide variety of roles and makes himself the protagonist of his art. He becomes both subject and projection screen, observer and object, hunter and hunted—playing with the boundaries between art and life, between role and person. These questions of identity(ies), the other, and otherness permeate his entire oeuvre. A compilation of portrait representations in various media opens the exhibition and reflects Schmidt’s fascination with the roles that individuals assume in society.
In another selection of works, Schmidt becomes a traveler and outsider, equally attracted and overwhelmed by foreign landscapes and worldviews that promise alternatives to his original urban lifestyle. Queer stereotypes associated with a fascination for high society and “other” exotic landscapes are also present in this selection.
Schmidt’s work repeatedly raises questions about queerness, sexuality, and power. One section of the exhibition focuses in particular on images of masculinity in the context of capitalist structures—on universal notions of success, clichés of power and resistance, and the fetishization of uniforms and attributes of power.
The final part of the exhibition presents the newly produced video work Rough Trade, which revisits the themes of the exhibition and transfers them to the present day: the intertwining of art and identity, and the call to reflect on the fluid boundaries between self-presentation and reality, between role models and personal experiences.
The exhibition was developed by KINDL – Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and will be shown at the EACC Castelló in 2026.
The exhibition is supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.
The video work Rough Trade is produced by Fluentum and will be shown for the first time as part of the exhibition.
A publication accompanying the exhibition will be released by DISTANZ Verlag with texts by Kathrin Becker, Louisa Elderton, Krist Gruijthuijsen, and Yara Sonseca Mas, supported by the Leinemann Foundation for Education and Art.
Erik Schmidt (* 1968 in Herford, lebt in Berlin)
Solo exhibitions (selection): Kunstraum Potsdam (2022); Leopold Hoesch Museum, Düren (2013); Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2012); Kunststation St. Peter Cologne (2010); Marta Herford (2007); Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam (2004); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (in collaboration with Corinna Weidner, 1999).
Group exhibitions (selection): Bröhan Museum, Berlin (2023); Jena Art Collection (2022); Hokkaido Obihiro Museum of Art, Kushiro Art Museum, Hakodate Museum of Art, Sapporo Art Museum, Japan (all 2019); Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur (2018); Tokyo Wonder Site (2017); National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (2016); Marta Herford (2015, 2009, 2005); Matsumoto City Museum of Art, Nagano (2015); Rohkunstbau, Schloss Roskow (2015); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2013); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2011); n.b.k, Berlin (2011, 2009); Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2011); Museo de las Artes de la Universidad de Guadalajara (2011); Kunsthalle zu Kiel (2009); Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen (2008); Institute Itaú Cultural, São Paulo (2008); Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2007); Fondazione Mudima, Milan (2007); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2007); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2004); Artists Space, New York (2004); Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2003); ARSENĀLS, Riga (2001).
Opening: Saturday, September 13, 2025, 6–9 pm
Exhibition dates: Sunday, September 14, 2025, to Sunday, February 1, 2026
Maschinenhaus M2
Curator: Yara Sonseca Mas
WHEN?
Cornelia Parker: Stolen Thunder (A Storm Gathering)
Opening: Saturday, September 13, 2025, 6–9 pm
Exhibition dates: Sunday, September 14, 2025, to Sunday, May 24, 2026
Phoebe Collings-James: The subtle rules the dense
Opening: Saturday, September 13, 2025, 6–9 pm
Exhibition dates: Sunday, September 14, 2025, to Sunday, February 15, 2026
Discourse program
October 29, 2025, 7 p.m.: Conversation between Katherina Perlongo and Phoebe Collings-James
October 30, 2025, 7:00 p.m.: Community session with Phoebe Collings-James at EOTO (Togostraße 76, 13351 Berlin) in the safer space event series for Black people and people of African descent, Who’s in Town.
November 12, 2025, 7:00 p.m.: Tour of the exhibition with Katherina Perlongo
Cihad Caner: Demonst(e)rating the Untamable Monster
Opening: Saturday, September 13, 2025, 6–9 pm
Exhibition dates: Sunday, September 14, 2025, to Sunday, February 15, 2026
The Rise and Fall of Erik Schmidt
Opening: Saturday, September 13, 2025, 6–9 pm
Exhibition dates: Sunday, September 14, 2025, to Sunday, February 1, 2026
Maschinenhaus M2
Curator: Yara Sonseca Mas
Opening hours:
Wed, 12:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Thu – Sun, 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm
WHERE?
KINDL – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Am Sudhaus 3
12053 Berlin
Cornelia Parker: Stolen Thunder (A Storm Gathering)
Kesselhaus
Phoebe Collings-James: The subtle rules the dense
Maschinenhaus M1
Cihad Caner: Demonst(e)rating the Untamable Monster
M1 VideoSpace
The Rise and Fall of Erik Schmidt
Maschinenhaus M2
COSTS?
Regular: 7 EUR
Reduced: 4 EUR
