‘Caught in a Landslide’: Art in the Age of Uncertainty

If the current state of affairs has taught us anything, it’s that uncertainty is not merely a passing state but an enduring condition. We live in flux, navigating shifting landscapes – both literal and metaphorical – across digital spheres, personal identity and physical spaces. These sentiments run deep in ‘Caught in a Landslide’, a group show spanning n.b.k. and the KINDL, featuring works by Berlin-based international artists who received the Berlin Senate’s 2024 visual arts work stipend. Through video, sound, painting, sculpture, installation and performance, the exhibition explores how individuals and communities navigate precarity, revealing uncertainty not as just something to be endured but as an active force shaping experience, perception and belonging.

One of the most pervasive forms of uncertainty today unfolds in the digital realm. Tethered to our screens, we are constantly subject to algorithmic manipulation. Jasmin Werner’s installation clickfarm (2025) materializes this invisible economy by recreating the makeshift working spaces of click farms – industries in which low-paid workers generate artificial online engagement for political or commercial purposes. Here, mobile phones are replaced with hand-carved wooden replicas made by Filipino artisans, neatly arranged on steel shelving in a U-formation. Among them, a cluster of ‘phones’ bears multiple eyes, some with tears trickling down in an eerie take on the ‘all-seeing eye’. In Werner’s work, the motif is rendered paradoxical, given the hidden nature of these exploitative systems, where control lies in the hands of the unseen.

While Werner’s clickfarm exposes how digital systems manufacture artificial engagement, uncertainty also operates on a deeply personal level. One of the most formative and universally felt periods of instability is arguably adolescence. Who among us didn’t feel their sense of self in flux amid the melodrama of our teenage years? Babette Semmer captures this feeling in a series of paintings, which reinterpret German teen magazine BRAVO’s ‘photo love stories’ from the late 1980s. Most striking among them is Ute & Martin (2024), a portrait of two teenagers whose attention is drawn beyond the canvas. Ute appears to be cutting Martin’s hair, yet both wear an apprehensive, ambiguous expression. The painting has a ghostly quality, its softened details and uneven lighting giving it the texture of a memory slipping away, something ungraspable yet persistent. 

Just as adolescence is marked by an unstable sense of self, displacement complicates one’s relationship to home. The challenge of maintaining a sense of belonging when its physical markers are constantly shifting is at the heart of Stephanie Comilang’s How to Make a Painting from Memory (2022), a video centred on the Thai diaspora in Berlin, particularly the community that once gathered in Preußenpark. Known locally as ‘Thai Park’, this informal market was a long-standing meeting point where Thai immigrants would cook and share food. Over time, it became increasingly commercialized, before eventually being relocated, disrupting what had become a home away from home for many. Throughout the film, Comilang asks women working in the park to draw their homes in Thailand from memory. From these sketches, she created gilded, 3D-printed sculptures modelled after traditional Thai spirit houses – structures built to shelter ancestral spirits, which here serve as poignant metaphors for diasporic resilience.

‘Caught in a Landslide’ makes clear that uncertainty is not just an external force but a state woven into lived experience, highlighting precarity as something that permeates both the personal and the collective. In Berlin, where cultural institutions face budget cuts and the future of its artistic landscape feels increasingly unstable, these themes take on an added weight. Yet rather than framing uncertainty as something to be overcome, the exhibition acknowledges it as a persisting condition – one that is neither inherently hopeful nor hopeless, but simply a fundamental part of life.

‘Caught in a Landslide’ is on view at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, until until 4 May and the KINDL, Berlin, until 6 July

_{Main image: Kristina Paustian, Children from Eforie, 2025, video still. Courtesy: © Kristina Paustian}