“Not a Moment, Not a Place” is the second exhibition of the newly founded Villa Heike Kunstverein and presents works by Ralf Brueck, Kathrin Ganser, and Daria Lou Nakov. Some of the works were produced specifically for this exhibition or are being shown for the first time. The works of the three artists originate from photographic “source images,” which they detach from their original contexts, overwrite through analog and digital manipulation and montage, and translate into new visual orders. They understand photography as a medium of transformation, in which the captured motifs not only become images, but in a further step are transformed once again into objects. The exhibition Not a Moment, Not a Place asks what this movement toward the objecthood of technical images means within the field of art, against the backdrop of a culture in which such images are otherwise consumed only as fleeting appearances on our digital displays.

The photographic series Magical Rage by Clara Bahlsen presents meticulously staged still lifes in which everyday objects—stones, rivets, potatoes, and tree trunks; an animal jawbone, or a printer and mobile phone—are removed from their usual context and brought together in dense, tension-filled arrangements. By placing these things into new, unexpected constellations, Bahlsen strips them of their everyday function, granting them instead a symbolic, almost allegorical quality. In the studio, Bahlsen stacks, balances, and stages the objects with one another so that they enter into precarious equilibria and contradictory relationships.

As you approach the gallery space, you are immediately confronted by an absence: A rectangular outline marked in black-and-white tape on the floor indicates that something is missing or has yet to arrive. The exhibition text reveals that the outline corresponds to the dimensions of Kreatur, a 1980 sculpture by artist Hüseyin Altin, around which “Die fehlende Folge (‘The Missing Episode’)” by Anike Joyce Sadiq at Sakhile&Me in Frankfurt am Main is framed. Kreatur was commissioned by the city of Stuttgart and installed at the center of the social housing estate Eiernest in the early 1980s, when many working-class migrant families were moving in, including Sadiq’s when she was three years old. It was precisely this demographic shift that a 2021 documentary on the history of Eiernest by regional broadcaster Südwestrundfunk (SWR) conspicuously skipped. This omission provided a starting point for Sadiq to explore the questions around memory, erasure, and resistance that eventually turned into the exhibition “Die fehlende Folge.”

In Es geht auch anders, control becomes both a tool of structure and intention. Its poetic counterforce lies in the act of relinquishing control, allowing the unexpected to seep in and transform into something unforeseen. The exhibition shows the works of Marta Djourina and Frank Mädler, whose works oscillate between control and chaos - not as opposing forces, but as interwoven elements.

In Dural's works, architecture and design are not merely structural or decorative, but can be seen as narrative tools that reflect on the multifaceted layers and interconnections of childhood and collective memory. In this, she plays with scale, colour and abstraction, bringing together the perspective of a child with that of an adult. With her mother having been a guest worker from Turkey, the work is in a way also a reflection on German social and economic history and its connection to migration. Consequently, Dural's biographical exploration of space, form and identity results in a dialogue between the personal and the political, in which her sculptures and installations become architectures of introspection, offering a reflection on perception.

I have always imagined the forest as a place of healing. A place that absorbs and transforms, transmutes and transcends all the diseases it encounters. An organism of multiple plant species communicating with one another, embodying a plurality of voices. I imagine a tree whispering into the ground and whilst the roots transmit the message, other plant species listen and bounce back with their nutrients. It is an interconnected circle of life, it decays, it decomposes, it regrows.

The UNTAMED forest is shown through a camera attached to the dancer’s body. Her spiralling movements reveal majestic trees hovering in the air, silently demonstrating their power, while we hear the eerie silence disturbed only by a sound reminiscent of wind blowing through the leaves and insects swirling around.

The exhibition All Beauty Must Die at Villa Heike in Berlin-Lichtenberg presents photographic works by Berlin-based artists Luise Marchand and Laura Schawelka. The works on display explore and question themes such as the preservation of beauty, death and transience. Brought together in the exhibition space, the works of Marchand and Schawelka open up a dialogue about beauty, transience and the complex interplay between representation and manipulation. As such, All Beauty Must Die is an exploration of the ephemeral nature of beauty while simultaneously addressing the passing of time.

Margaret Murphy is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose work explores themes of femininity, the complexity of the gaze on women, the commodification of identity, and the influence of social media on photography. The exhibition I Could Look at You All Day is her first solo exhibition in Germany. In the photographic series of the same title, she addresses self-perception and self-observation as a woman by pointing the camera at her own body. The work is shown alongside her recent series Fat Feminine, in which she creates AI-generated images that open up new perspectives on fatness in relation to femininity. Murphy describes her practice as a visual play of contrasts: serious and humorous, substantial and superficial, subjective and political, emotive and detached.

The exhibition ONLY A PART, NOT THE WHOLE brings together works that play with processes of transformation, manipulation and de-identification. Using abstraction, poetry, distraction, and reappropriation, the artists weave concepts of visual representation with memory and fiction to blur the distinction between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the digital. In doing so, the exhibited works allude to the paradoxes of illusion and deception by taking objects out of their original context and transforming them into new images in order to make visible the production of narratives and perception that shape our surroundings.

Anike Joyce Sadiq’s works often deal with the conditions in which art is presented, the infrastructures in which artists and institutions operate, and how »perspectives of difference are negotiated« by the bodies that reside in them. Also, in her latest exhibition Mit Glück hat es nichts zu tun at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, on view until September 25, Sadiq explores the frameworks within artists function, their social dynamics, and the respective relationships to bodies, places, and institutions, offering a place for debate. Here, the institutional space is not understood in an architectural sense but as sets of beliefs, perpetuated by bodies participating in the field of art.