The clipped, sharp voice of artist Nina Könnemann cuts through the three lo-fi films currently playing at Haus am Waldsee. It’s an attractive voice, sometimes animated but never flustered. We hear her call out random “hellos”, chat with strangers and occasionally issue indecipherable instructions to her team as she directs thrillingly loose, ad-hoc tours through unseen, everyday worlds: a day out in Berlin, a final ski session, the sodden end of the Frankfurt Marathon.
Time oozes by. Nothing much happens, yet it’s strangely mesmerising – like doomscrolling on multiple phones at once
In the multi-location live film, BLOCKEN FINALS (2025) – filmed live in three locations during the exhibition opening – that castellated beige building on Mehringdamm is roughly montaged over a queue of hungry Berliners lining up for one of Mustafa’s kebabs. At times, we see policemen in yellow vests standing around, talking, looking bored. Time oozes by. Nothing much happens, yet it’s strangely mesmerising – like doomscrolling on multiple phones at once. After a while you’ll find yourself fidgeting, checking your phone, wondering why the fuck you’re wasting your afternoon watching this.
In another location, a football fan, on his way to German’s DFB-Pokal, notices the camera and starts prancing around. The camera doesn’t move or react – it just holds the frame. After some time, even the man gets bored. Tensing his muscles one final time, he throws a desultory thumbs up and turns away. Sitting there, watching this half-cut oaf, the artist is almost daring us to find something significant. And maybe there is – but not, perhaps, in a way we’re accustomed to. Könneman’s not trying to make a statement – how could she? She’s just live filming, catching life as it rolls inexorably on.
Two stops down the U3, Fluentum – once the Nazi Luftwaffe’s administrative offices and later the US military headquarters in West Berlin, now a sumptuous private collection – offers a similarly stripped-back feel in its group exhibition, Rushes. Here, rather than the temporal thrills of live filming, the selection of videos homes in on our compulsive and somewhat uncontrolled relationship to screens and digital media.
This is well illustrated in SoiL Thornton’s video, Grace/Graze(d)/Grief Complementary (2011–18), as a gloved hand picks up paperweights resting on (or suppressing) newspapers. With histrionic background music, the mundane objects take on a ludicrously malevolent air. At certain intervals, rectangular ‘portals’ open up to reveal videos of green caterpillars climbing stalks, a homeless man feeding a pigeon, someone stamping on a baguette. It’s brazen and random – art that seems well-attuned to our digitally-ravaged attention spans. You’re so distracted by its multi-screen stimuli, you can’t help but follow its ridiculous conceit.
Every work in the show is a bit like this: raw, slapdash, hectic – a striking contrast to the austere, marble-bedecked architecture. Josiane M.H. Pozi’s ‘m.c.’ (2025) plays up to this with a piece that feels both meagre and profound. Presented on a chunky square plinth (you have to peer into it like looking down a well), abstract visuals accompany inane fragments of conversation; the hushed whispers of the couple in a cinema; a man “burned” after a boorish chat-up line.
All this playfulness bodes well. In the past, Fluentum has carefully tiptoed around its Nazi history, struggling to move out from under that dark shadow. Now, under new leadership, mockery might succeed where solemnity failed; taking it to extremes with a David Moser audio installation – so fearsomely annoying, I thought more than once about switching it off.
Generally, though, in both spaces, there’s a disarming ordinariness to what’s on show. Art is not some glorified, untouchable sphere. It’s right there, in your hand. Often staring right back at you – and just as commonplace as that daily scroll through the park.
