Sculpture, sound and video installation

Built to Order I – Dreamstalker, Zornblume, Traumstaub, Falling Down examines the tensions between architectural reality and the realm of constructed images as well as the mechanisms according to which urban spaces become legible and belonging is negotiated. The starting point is a growing archive of media representations of the Neukölln housing estate in which Bethan Hughes has been living since 2020. Between the built structure and the images placed over it, a space of myriad projections is created: fantasy, desire, surveillance, acts of discipline and racialised violence leave their mark on both the perception of the place and its social reality.

Architecture doesn’t appear as a neutral backdrop here, but rather as a site of competing regimes of visibility. The estate is at once material living space and object of projection for society’s imaginary. Media images promise transparency and legibility, but create distance, control and attribution at the same time. Hughes asks which forms of proximity and distance, revealing and concealment are effective here – and how these regimes determine who becomes visible, who remains exposed and whose perspective remains invisible.

As an audiovisual shadow play, Built to Order I – Dreamstalker, Zornblume, Traumstaub, Falling Down connects archival material, found footage, video, spatial sound and newly interpreted architectural elements. Two screens positioned opposite one another show fragmented sequences from film and everyday footage, while a four-channel soundtrack of field recordings generates additional atmosphere within the space. There is a street lamp made of steel and glass located between the screens which is similar to the ones installed in the estate – it becomes a figure of silent observation here.

Light, sound, sculpture and image intertwine and translate abstract power structures into physical experience. The installation makes tangible how spaces are “programmed”: how concepts of security, danger or desire circulate and are inscribed into architecture; how media narratives reshape social reality; how everyday surroundings become charged through discursive attributions.

The work simultaneously subverts such fixed ideas. The fragmented montage resists one obvious reading, shifts perspectives and creates confusion. Narratives are liberated from their seemingly closed nature, visual spaces are inverted and acoustic layers accumulate. It’s thus not a coherent depiction of the estate that emerges, but rather a tangle of traces, projections and counter-gazes.

Moving between the transparent and the opaque and reality and fiction, Built to Order I – Dreamstalker, Zornblume, Traumstaub, Falling Down develops an examination of how perception is organised – and how this order can be shifted. The work allows the viewer to experience that the city is not just constructed, but also continually narrated. In this narrative, belonging is created alongside exclusion, just as intimacy emerges in parallel with distance. Hughes reveals these process without fixing them in didactic fashion – and thus opens up a space in which the learned categorisation of urban images begins to totter.

• Sektion Section: An Incomplete Assembly
• Programm Programme: An Incomplete Assembly