Heike Kabisch
Memories in deep creeks
ChertLüdde, Berlin
1 March – 12 April 2025

Memories in deep creeks is an exhibition by Heike Kabisch (b. 1978, Münster, Germany) that transforms the ChertLüdde gallery into an underwater arcadia. Unfolding like an uncharted map, the installation evokes the protective embrace of a cave or sanctuary inhabited by hybrid marine creatures suspended between evolution and decay. 

Kabisch consistently explores themes of vulnerability, transformation, and the complexities of the human condition. Her work drifts between feeling and intellect to the point that it erodes the distinction between time and place, the personal and archival. Working primarily with clay, plaster and found materials, she constructs figures and environments that feel both familiar and otherworldly, often balancing the grotesque with the poetic.

In Memories in deep creeks, Kabisch draws from the deep ocean floor and the secretive depths of sheltered waterways. Organic and anthropomorphic forms gather from the depths, mixing sweetwater and salt- into a fictional ecosystem. This world contains fragmented memories and histories, but only in peripheral details, allowing them to melt like topographies and state lines, falling wayside for imagined futures.

Entering this world, bathed in dark and ambient light, feels like stepping into the doldrums where colors are muted and time flows differently. Visitors are enveloped in a sense of melancholy, tinged by fleeting dreams. 

In the far corner of the gallery are two baby seahorses, their fragile forms intertwined with human legs that emerge like the roots of a tropical plant. Wires, twisted and knotted, and blankets arranged like barnacles or coral become camouflage for the seahorses. One of the genus’s most remarkable survival strategies, the camouflage of Kabisch’s creatures seems to be an adaptation from living in an industrial wasteland.

Swimming elsewhere in the gallery are two other hybrid seahorses enclasped in each other’s embrace–one tail holding tightly onto the others. This scene is inspired by the Surrealised scientific film from 1934 of French filmmaker Jean Painlevé (1902, Paris, France – 1989,  Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) titled L’Hippocampe (The Seahorse). This black and white film documents the peculiarities of the ambiguously sexed seahorses, controversial at the time for showing how the female inserts her eggs in the male’s belly. Upon a second look at Kabisch’s sculpture, the mother’s human face—a rusted shade of flesh—is shared across some of the other sculptures, also appearing in the tree-shaped rock titled In the shell of her body’s shadow (2025). 

This free-standing sculpture, where a mother rests within a tree and her daughter sleeps against her fossilized body, alludes to a painting from the late 18th century. In French painter Alfred Guillou’s (1844 – 1926, Concarneau, France) Mère et enfant au bord de la mer (Mother and Child by the Sea), a veiled woman is seen knitting while her young child sleeps in a bed of bladderwrack, seaweed that has washed onto the sand. In her adaptation, Kabisch trades the bladderwrack for enveloping fabrics—terrycloth, kitchen towels, and baby blankets—imbuing the sculpture with a sense of comfort in a harsh world.

In Heike Kabisch’s art, the deep, imagined worlds she creates reflect on the longing for  harmony and purity of nature, reminiscent of the Arcadian landscapes of the 17th and 18th centuries. These idealized pastoral scenes were a symbol of humanity’s desire for a harmonious retreat from the pressures of urban life, but Kabisch reinterprets this motif in the context of our contemporary moment, where rising sea levels and forced migration are reshaping the world. Her world is like an artificial reef, reimagining a sanctuary at the ocean’s floor—a realm of immense pressure yet profound stillness.

On the walls surrounding the sculptures there are collaged drawings on historical maps obtained from the Berlin State Library. These maps, originally intended to chart stable geographies, become unstable narratives in Kabisch’s hands. Depicting bodies of water from across the globe, she intervenes in these cartographies with drawings of two figures—resembling herself and her daughter—who journey together through time and place. In Kabisch’s work, moments of clarity are fleeting—becoming instead a confluence of shadowy histories, ideas, or propositions filtered into something universal, archival, or fantastical. With long, vail-like hair of bubbles, Kabisch allows the figures to move across oceans like the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, or slip into the North Balabac Strait. They are not limited to one place, drifting along demarcated territories, holding an ecological heritage we might lose or, perhaps, one we might soon inherit. The individual studies for these figures are also displayed against a magnetic grey wall, transforming into speculative hypotheses or preliminary sketches of fictional characters.

Heike Kabisch’s Memories in deep creeks is an exhibition that evokes both resilience and fragility, offering a glimpse into speculative futures where bodies, landscapes, mythologies, and histories dissolve and are reconfigured.

Photo by Marjorie Brunet Plaza

Biography

Heike Kabisch (1978, Münster, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. She obtained a Master’s degree at the Glasgow School of Art. In 2009, she won the Bergischer Kunstpreis. Kabisch has held both professorships (2021-2022) and lectures (since 2017) at Berlin University of the Arts and Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. 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. In the smudges, impressions and careful tearing apart of materials, the viewer is given a glimpse into the labor of taming the fleeting elements of our lives. This continues with her drawings, all of which are obscured or antiqued through their titles, which follow a fictional archiving system invented by the artist. Across her mediums, Kabisch is able to explore the unfixed timelines of a beating and pulsing body of work.

Her works have been exhibited in venues such as: Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem; Nomas Foundation, Rome; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome; Kunstverein Kirschenpflücker, Köln; Künstlerhaus Dortmund; Kunstverein Gelsenkirchen; Kunstmuseum Baden Solingen; Kunstverein Leverkusen, Leverkusen; Städtische Galerie Markdorf, Kunstverein Markdorf e.V.; Wewerka-Pavillion, Münster; Cornerhouse, Manchester and Drei Raum für Gegenwartskunst, Cologne. Collections: Nomas Foundation, Rome; Vergez Collection, Buenos Aires; Kunst aus Nordrhein-Westfalen, Aachen.