A soft edge to break a swordGroup ShowChertLüdde / Potsdamer Strasse 97, Berlin16 November 2024 – 21 December 2024Matinee: Saturday, 16 November 2024, 1 – 6 pm

ChertLüdde presents A soft edge to break a sword, a group exhibition featuring works by Monia Ben Hamouda, Stephanie Comilang, Patrizio di Massimo, Kasia Fudakowski, Petrit Halilaj, Heike Kabisch, Wilhelm Klotzek, Zora Mann, Beatriz Morales, Sofia Salazar Rosales, Young-jun Tak, Tyra Tingleff, Álvaro Urbano, Zhibo Wang and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt.

Hosted at the gallery’s temporary space at Potsdamer Straße 97, the exhibition brings together a diverse array of artistic approaches. From etching and stitching to painting and welding, the show underscores the subversive tools of softness and vulnerability. Together, the show challenges traditional notions of strength to illustrate how a soft edge can have the power to break even the sharpest sword.

Artists’ biographies

Monia Ben Hamouda (1991, Milan, Italy) lives and works between al-Qayrawan and Milan. Ben Hamouda’s practice reflects her Tunisian and Italian heritage, sculpting calligraphic references that blend identity and meaning, with specific emphasis on Islamic rituals, history and medicinal spices through the Islamic tradition of aniconism. Her work has been shown at the MACRO, MAXXI, Istituto Svizzero, La Casa Encendida, Heidelberger Kunstverein, FRAC Corsica and Museion. She is currently a finalist for the MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE IV and recipient of the Museion Audience Award (2024) and Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation Grant (2024).

Stephanie Comilang (1980, Toronto, Canada) is a Filipina-Canadian artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary-based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labor on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at the Tate Modern, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Hamburger Bahnhof, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Julia Stoschek Collection and Haus der Kunst. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.

Patrizio di Massimo (1983, Jesi, Italy) lives and works in London. Over the past decade, di Massimo has cultivated a distinct aesthetic that merges figuration with elements from Italian history, particularly drawing inspiration from Baroque tones and dramatic portraiture. His artistic representations exhibit an uncanny and sometimes grotesque quality, exploring various aspects of human nature. His work has been exhibited at Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, ParaSite, Dhaka Art Summit, Museion, Triennale di Milano, Milan, Castello di Rivoli, Stedelijk Museum, Museo do Arte do Rio, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Villa Medici, EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art, Gasworks and Kunsthalle Lisbon.

Kasia Fudakowski (1985, London, England) lives and works in Berlin. Her diverse and playful practice, which includes sculpture, film, performance, and writing, explores social riddles through material encounters, surreal logic and comic theory. Fudakowski’s works refer to the allure and danger of binary categorisation and the subsequent absurdity that it unfolds in our political and social climate, revealing the discrepancies amongst cultural norms. Her work has been exhibited at Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, 1646, Centre for Contemporary Art Futura, Harburger Bahnhof and Bauhaus Museum Dessau. She was awarded the Arts Maebashi Prize (2019) and the Otto d’Ame Film Award (2016).

Petrit Halilaj (1986, Kostërrc, Kosovo) lives and works in Berlin. His work is deeply connected to the recent history of his native country Kosovo and the consequences of cultural and political tensions in the region, which he often takes as a starting point for igniting countercurrent poetics for the future. Rooted in his biography, the projects encompass a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, painting, text and performance. He has exhibited recently at the Met, Museo Tamayo, Tate St Ives; Palacio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofia and New Museum. He received the Kunstpreis Berlin from the Akademie der Künste in 2023 and was honored with the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (SARF) in 2018. In 2017, he earned both the Mario Merz Prize and a special mention from the jury at the 57th Venice Biennale.

Heike Kabisch (1978, Münster, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Informed by archival materials, family heirlooms, or objects otherwise facing extinction, Heike Kabisch presents fragmentation as a poetic tool for regeneration. Her practice unfolds across figurative sculpture, installation, drawing, and collage. To capture a sense of vulnerability, her sculptures often have wires, cracks or raw material exposed as a way to resist completion and remain open to revision, chance and time. Her work has been exhibited at Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, Nomas Foundation, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Kunstverein Kirschenpflücker, Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Kunstverein Gelsenkirchen, Kunstmuseum Baden Solingen, Kunstverein Leverkusen and Cornerhouse.

Wilhelm Klotzek (1980, Berlin, Germany) is best known for his sculptures, videos, and performances, interspersed with sound poetry and word jugglings, in which he takes up everyday cultural or even political-historical phenomena. In terms of content, the examination of post-socialist reality is a recurring theme, while at the same time public space and people’s relationship to architecture play an important role. Since 2023 he has been teaching as a professor in the sculpture department at the Berlin Weißensee Art Academy. His works have been on display at DAS MINSK, Schloss Derneburg, Schloss Bellevue, Institut für Kunst und Kontext Berlin, Bibliothek der Gemäldegalerie, Memphis in Linz and ifa-gallery Berlin, among others.

Zora Mann (1979, Amersham, England) lives and works in Berlin. Mann’s identifiable aesthetic ventures into the realms of disparate experiences and scores of interests. Her vibrating, psychedelic expression finds influence in folklore, geometry, dreamlike shifts, vibrant, affective color palettes and surreal repetition that moves in relation to so many other competing movements. Zora Mann’s work has been exhibited at Berlinische Galerie, Villa Arson, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Haus am Lützowplatz, Palais De Tokyo and BKV-Brandenburgischen Kunstverein.

Beatriz Morales (1981, Mexico City) lives and works between Berlin and Mexico. Morales combines an investigative, abstract-expressionist approach with textile art, fiber art and conceptual components, often realized in monumental installations. As part of her practice, the artist incorporates traditional, pre-hispanic dyeing techniques, both in her work with plant fibers as well as when painting on canvases. Her work has been exhibited at Museo Tamayo, Mexican Painting Biennial, Circle Culture, Chancellery Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art MACAY and Frieder Burda Museum. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Social Arts Award in Berlin and was the 2006 winner of the Jeune Créateur Prize.

Sofia Salazar Rosales (1999, Quito, Ecuador) lives and works between Paris, Amsterdam and Quito. In her practice, she often recreates objects tied to her home and surroundings, blending organic and industrial elements. She conceives her pieces as spaces of reconciliation to negotiate between the object, the material and their history throughout different contexts. Reconciling is also a constructive gesture in her work, which continuously transforms the objects with particular focus on their emotional effect. This year, her work is on view at the 17th Contemporary Art Biennial of Lyon and she is currently participating in the two-year residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In 2023, she was nominated for Premio illy Sustain Art Prize and Emerige-CPGA Prize and won the SARR Prize in 2022.

Young-jun Tak (1989, Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in Berlin. In Tak’s artistic practice, he investigates some of the socio-cultural and psychological mechanisms that are part of shaping certain belief systems. Appropriating Christian religious iconographies and anti-LGBTQ+ printed materials, Tak redeploys them together to amplify the dissonances between the devotional imagery and the organizations’ base messaging and actions. His work has been exhibited at Atelier Hermès (Seoul), Julia Stoschek Foundation (Dusseldorf, Berlin), the 4th Bangkok Art Biennale, the High Line (New York), the 5th Chicago Architecture Biennial, the 16th Lyon Biennale, the 11th Berlin Biennale, the 15th Istanbul Biennial, KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Seoul Museum of Art SeMA Bunker, amongst others. In 2024, he was the winner of the Love at First Sight Prize at the 3rd St. Moritz Art Film Festival.

Tyra Tingleff (1984, Hönefoss, Norway) lives and works between Oslo and Berlin. Typically kept to a portrait format, Tyra Tingleff’s expansive visual world is fluid, punk, unrestrained– limitless. Combining a manifold of techniques in her oil paintings on raw canvas, Tingleff balances vibrant shades and hues that refract like sedimentary layers. Her work has been exhibited at Kunstnerfubundet, SALTS, Kunsthall Oslo; Kunstverein Arnsberg and Kunstnernes Hus. In 2020, she was the recipient of the Fegerstens Stiftelsen Award, Norwegian Cultural Department Scholarship and the Ringerike Sparebankstiftelse Editorial Scholarship.

Álvaro Urbano (1983, Madrid, Spain) lives and works in Berlin. Urbano’s work involves an archeology of desires and past intentions. By creating atmospheres that replicate specific spaces and architectural gestures, the artist explores the narratives that are embedded in these built bodies. These staged realities are inhabited by vegetal and animal elements, only from a close distance these entities reveal themselves as intricate organic simulations. His work has recently been exhibited at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, SculptureCenter, Bergen Assembly, Storefront for Art and Architecture, MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 24th Biennale of Sydney and Hamburger Bahnhof.

Zhibo Wang (1981, Zhejiang) lives and works in Berlin. Zhibo’s practice surveys the absurd spectrum of what is real – geographically, historically, ethnographically, architecturally. She creates oil on canvas paintings that confound our notions of time and space. Transcending traditionalism through the subject matter depicted, which is both curious and challenging, Wang channels her painting to represent the variances of our visual experiences, similar to the reflection on the surface of water: capable of capturing the multiple manifolds of a subject. Her work has been exhibited at the Taipei Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai Art Museum, Aranya Art Center, Times Art Center, Villa Vassilieff, Chongqing Art Museum, and Penrith Regional Art Gallery. In 2008, she won the prestigious national Luo Zhongli Scholarship.

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (1932, Wurzen – 2024, Berlin, Germany) was born in Wurzen, Saxony, and after the war she settled in Berlin. Despite not having a formal artistic education, she produced paintings, pastels, drawings and most notably what she calls “typewritings”. Works on paper made on a typewriter, the typewritings are intricate studies spanning concrete poetry, linguistics, graphic design and conceptual art – innovative hybrids of language, symbols and visual form. Although in the beginning of her practice Wolf-Rehfeldt explored semiotics and concrete poetry, she began to shift her focus in later years to abstract compositions, moving from linguistic signage to language as form and matter. Her work has been exhibited at DAS MINSK Potsdam, Sammlung Schering Stiftung im Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, MAMCO, Kunstverein Reutlingen, Tirana National Gallery of Arts, Albertinum, Hamburger Bahnhof, Malmö Konsthall, documenta 14, Museum für konkrete Kunst, Museum Barberini, Kunstnernes Hus, Martin Gropius Bau, Schloss Plüschow Museum and The Weserburg Study Centre / Museum of Modern Art Bremen. Wolf-Rehfeldt was awarded with the Gerhard-Altenbourg Prize of the Lindenau-Museums 2021 and the Hannah Höch Prize 2022.