IT

This year, the Hamburger Bahnhof ‒ Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, celebrates its 30th anniversary. For the occasion, the museum offers a programme that embraces retrospection, prospection and collaboration. On the first floor of the East Wing of the former railway station stands the group exhibition “[ materialistin ]. Matter of Care, Care of Matter”, curated by the museum’s co-director Sam Bardaouil. Open since early July and on view until 14 March 2027, the exhibition brings together eight artists working in Leipzig ‒ Laura Eckert, Enne Haehnle, Elisabeth Howey, Lucy König, Agnes Lammert, Wibke Rahn, Theresa Rothe and Sophie Uchman ‒ who form the eponymous collective, united by a shared practice: sculpture.

In Leipzig, eight artists working across the broader field of sculpture form the collective [ materialistin ]; the exhibition Matter of Care, Care of Matter, curated by Sam Bardaouil at the Hamburger Bahnhof ‒ Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, features their works, from sculptures to site-specific installations, opening a view into the city’s contemporary sculpture scene, and into new forms of artistic community and collaboration. Stepping through the doorway, one enters a room with blue-grey walls and dimmed lighting, where the works of the eight artists seem to sense one another’s presence, each holding its own space while remaining porous to what surrounds it. A threshold, rather than a summary, hints at the plurality of gestures still to be discovered. Then the space unfolds: the main room hosts each artist’s works individually. 
Laura Eckert’s sculptures are the first to draw our attention, with her intriguing busts of stone and wood, arranged on a metal shelf in an almost serial order, unsettled by shifts in size and orientation. Instead of a path to follow, it is the works themselves that extend an invitation to the visitor: despite this segmentation into autonomous presentations, they remain quietly attuned to one another, and from Laura Eckert’s pieces, one can already glimpse, in the distance, those of Theresa Rothe. This format is surprising at first: one does not necessarily expect, from a collective’s exhibition, the creation of distinct spaces where connections are left to be sensed rather than asserted. Yet this is precisely the choice that carries the group’s proposition, a different way of forming a collective. Rather than displaying a shared discourse, [ materialistin ] allows each artist their own site of presentation, and it is here, in the margins and the glances that cross from one space to another, that the true collective gesture resides. Sam Bardaouil outlines this intention in the catalogue of the exhibition: “The collective does not dissolve individual authorship into a unified aesthetic identity. Rather it creates a framework within which singular practices remain legible while entering into processes of exchange, overlap and mutual support.” Their encounter plays out differently here, in life as in the exhibition.

ON COLLECTIVITY AND AUTHORSHIP: [ MATERIALISTIN ]’S PRACTICES

Under the initiative of Wibke Rahn, [ materialistin ] was founded in 2019 and emerged in response to the physical, economic and logistical pressures that sculpture as a medium places on women artists. Formed of artists all born between 1960 and 1990 in Germany, the collective presents itself as an inter-generational and non-hierarchical group, fostering a stability within the collective that allows for the exchange and solidarity artists need to create and evolve in their practices. The collective thus unfolds through eight distinct voices, held together by the same constraints of gesture and matter, where authorship itself ceases to belong solely to the figure of the artist and becomes a distributed function, shared between body, tool and material. Here, collective production is not merely a political choice: it is a material necessity. A feminist collective of a singular kind, then, one that does not declare itself but practices itself: “The collective does not articulate feminism as programmatic declaration. Rather, feminism emerges as method: as the capacity to sustain shared conditions of production across time, materials constraints and institutional instability”, as the curator writes. 

THE EXHIBITION AT THE HAMBURGER BAHNHOF

The exhibition invites us to encounter these variations. In Sophie Uchman’s work, ceramic is never quite anchored: the artist bends, twists and reshapes the material. Displayed in pairs, the pieces she presents are made of unglazed, fired clay and retain traces of the modeling process, right up to the precise point where they risk collapsing under their own weight, and where each pair seems to test the same unknown hypothesis. Laura Eckert, conversely, seeks not the fragile instant but geological slowness: in her work Dialogue Piece, made of Untersberg marble, a limb seems to emerge very gradually from the rock, without ever fully breaking free of it. In her sculptures, she also brings together multiple materials, wood, plaster and wax, depicting forms in transition, between landscape, body and organic structure. Two other pieces interrogate the disappearance of the human presence through the matter that survives it. Lucy König builds hybrid furniture, somewhere between workbench and garden, where vegetation reclaims mineralised domestic objects. König suggests, through this device, that a meal, a gathering, a social use once took place here, with nobody left to bear witness to it. Wibke Rahn carves the memory of a construction site into concrete, not to represent a specific object, but to preserve the abstract trace of a gesture, construction or demolition, like a negative of human passage across the landscape, and of the social and political transformations it brings about.

Elsewhere, two artists engage with the question of shelter through quite different means. Theresa Rothe creates visual worlds situated between dream, the grotesque, and reality. Within the exhibition space, she builds a site-specific, enclosed, theatrical work, ringed with red plastic curtains, saturated with synthetic materials and figures halfway between toy and creature, so that one no longer knows whether one is entering a shelter or a trap. By contrast, Agnes Lammert with her striking installation Murmuration, suspends in mid-air an animal architecture woven from steel wire and coconut-fibre fabric, which traces, through the sheer repetition of its cavities, the very idea of a possible refuge. Elisabeth Howey’s gesture retains the memory of bodily training: her forms in plaster, wood wool and found materials, neither plant nor animal, retain remnants of a spontaneous, choreographic gesture that preceded their making. These extend the practice of butō, the Japanese dance of transformation that has nourished this body of work she has been developing since 2018. Enne Haehnle closes the exhibition with structures of forged steel and black annealed wire, which appear disordered, that follow a textual rather than volumetric logic, where line takes the place of mass. It is her work, a neon sign in the first room, that lends the exhibition its title; here, a second neon, my crying is older than me, which closes the loop, recalling how memory and the persistence of the past run through her work.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MATTER

This exhibition’s way of thinking about agency as distributed finds an echo in the notion of vibrant matter developed by philosopher Jane Bennett, for whom every capacity to act arises from ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. In [ materialistin ]’s work, this idea shifts toward care: to care for matter is to care for one another. Matter here becomes a genuine collaborator, a condition rather than a mere medium. Sculpture demands attentiveness and care in the very process of making; in the time it takes; the failures it entails; the repetition it imposes. Thus, the exhibition presents itself as a laboratory of forms, one that also mirrors the collective’s own dynamics: an almost pedagogical space where exchange and mutual recognition are paramount, and where support is the core principle. This is what Sam Bardaouil calls a condition of “survival”, understood not biologically, but as the active maintenance of the very conditions of work. 

Héloïse Robinot

3 July 2026 ‒ 14 March 2026
[ materialistin ]. Matter of Care, Care of Matter
curated by Sam Bardaouil
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart
Invalidenstraße 50, Berlin 
[ materialistin ] Matter of Care, Care of Matter