On Friday, 09. January 2026, at 7 pm the exhibition “Phantome” by Polish artist Dominik Lejman opens at St. Matthäus Church at Kulturforum Berlin. Curated by Hubertus von Amelunxen, the exhibition brings together around 20 works spanning nearly three decades and presents Lejman’s distinctive fusion of painting and video as a site-specific exploration of perception, presence, and transience.
Image avobe: Dominik Lejman, 2020, photo: Michał Gieniusz
Polish artist Dominik Lejman has been hunting ghosts for three decades. His art, exhibited worldwide, superimposes video images onto abstract paintings. The paintings are briefly inhabited by revenants, phantoms—a disturbing art of alignment, imprisonment, and fall. The exhibition, curated by Hubertus von Amelunxen, is on display at St. Matthäus Church in Berlin and features around 20 works from the period between 1995 and the present.
The Epiphany season, during which the exhibition takes place, is the time of God’s appearance in the world: time and eternity intertwine. In Dominik Lejman’s works, people fall out of time into the cracks of the present—a paradox. They are phantoms, belonging to no time, yet recurring in every time. Thus, viewing his pictures is like an apparition in which the ambivalence of the familiar and the uncanny is revealed; imprisonment and paradisiacal longing. “The time is out of joint,” says the ghost to Hamlet.
Dominik Lejman’s work is obsessive, its aesthetics following the movement of human existence, its orientation, with a careful mixture of doubt, humor, and despair. His work swings like a pendulum between revelation and repulsion, elevation and fall, Elysium and dungeon. Unique in his combination of content, media transmission, and aesthetics, Dominik Lejman has shaped the question of the possible in the absurd.
To be haunted by phantoms means remembering something we have never experienced in the present. All the more so, Dominik Lejman’s work asks us how we deal with our presence, our time, and with what responsibility.
Dominik Lejman (born 1969) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and at the Royal College of Art in London. He gained international attention in 1999 with the exhibition After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, among other things. His works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Fondazione Prada, and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Lejman’s works are held in major public and private collections. He is a professor at the University of Arts in Poznań and lives and works in Poznań and Berlin.
The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive program of events including readings, choreographies, performances, and lectures.
Phantoms: 13.01.2026, 7 pm
Ulrich Loock, Anda Rottenberg, and Hannes Langbein in conversation with Dominik Lejman, moderated by Hubertus v. Amelunxen (in English).
Veil: 20.01.2026, 7 pm
Veil is a performance by Maria Colusi that explores the fragile boundary between visible and invisible forces—the liminal space where matter becomes spirit, sound becomes silence, and the body dissolves into atmosphere. It is an encounter with the conditions of ghosting: how light, breath, and vibration themselves harbor the potential for presence even in their absence. Here, the veil is not a curtain separating worlds, but a living membrane—porous, trembling, and sensitive—through which perception itself breathes. Maria Colusi is an Argentine dancer, choreographer, and lecturer who lives in Berlin. As a long-time member of Sasha Waltz & Guests, she creates choreographic works that combine dance, music, and visual arts. Her creations have been presented internationally at renowned venues and festivals. Colusi also teaches composition and improvisation worldwide.
The Chess Player: 27.01.2026, 7 pm
Reading of poems and prose texts by Howard Altman and Zbigniew Herbert with Howard Altman, Michael Krüger, and others (in the original and in German translation).
Ubu: 03.02.2026, 7 p.m.
Performance by Krzysztof “Leon” Diemaszkiewicz, born in Poland in 1963, a performer and visual artist living in Berlin. He began his career in the early 1990s in Gdańsk, Poland, as a dancer and choreographer at Teatr Ekspresji. In 1995, he founded his own company, “Read my lips theatre.” Since 1998, he has lived and worked mainly in Berlin and Gdańsk. His art has been presented in the USA, France, Germany, Turkey, Brazil, Canada, Italy, and many other countries. The aim of Dziemaszkiewicz’s transgender and transsexual work is to connect opposites and question the boundaries between animality and humanity.
Ghost Sound: 10.02.2026, 7 pm
Concert with jazz musician and composer Mikolaj Trzaska.
WHEN?
Opening: Friday, 09. January at 7 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 10 January – Sunday, 15 February 2026
Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
WHERE?
St. Matthäus Church
Kulturforum Berlin
Matthäikirchplatz
10785 Berlin
Germany
COST?
Admission free
