Culture – Numéro Berlin

ART EXHIBTION – MIDNIGHT ZONE BY JULIAN CHARRIÈRE

Anna Klusmeier — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:40:29 +0000

The exhibition Midnight Zone by French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg presents a fascinating exploration of the infinite vastness of the sea. In his works Charrière links artistic visions with scientific findings about our environment, with water serving as the central focus. It is the basis of all life and, at the same time, a fiercely contested resource. The exhibition illuminates both the impressive side of the element and the crises of our time, ranging from the climate catastrophe and melting glaciers to the threat to the oceans from pollution and industrial mining on the seabed. In science, the “Midnight Zone” refers to the area of the ocean lying between 1,000 and 4,000 meters below the surface, where no rays of sunlight can reach. It is the namesake of the current exhibition.

To create the feeling of being underwater, the entire hall is completely darkened and accompanied by the actual soundscape that occurs at this depth. Contrary to popular belief, the underwater world is by no means a place of silence. The theme of phonography, acoustic recordings, guides visitors through the first three rooms of the exhibition. Behind this lies the overarching concept of porosity. The recordings of coral reefs make audible how countless organisms, such as snapping shrimp and fish, create a dense fabric of sound. Each reef possesses its very own characteristic acoustic note, which was captured for this work.

A central aspect of the exhibition is rooted in a personal experience of the artist: the so-called “drift dive” in the open ocean. In a drift dive, one allows oneself to drift suspended with the current until, in the monotony of the deep blue, any sense of space and direction disappears. Charrière describes this state as being carried by the water, a physical merging with the environment.

Reemerging far from the starting point illustrates the power of invisible currents and the blurring of the boundary between the individual and the environment. This idea of porosity and merging with the biosphere runs like a common thread through his works.

For a photo series in the exhibition, Charrière collaborated with two breath-hold divers who let themselves glide into the depths without breathing apparatus. The shots show an astounding natural phenomenon: an undersea layer, the halocline, which appears like a second water surface or a “sea beneath the sea.” The works show how human bodies sink into this dense layer and are, in a sense, swallowed by the water. This scenery serves as a metaphor for diving into the unconscious, a state of total suspension in which the boundaries of the physical world seem to blur. A central feature of Julian Charrière’s work is the deliberate use of ambivalence.

Charrière’s works often possess a very appealing aesthetic, paired with uncanny and hidden elements. This interplay of beauty and unease runs through many of his works.

The video installations show the impressive biodiversity in the dark regions of the ocean. The gaze follows a lamp from the sky down into the midnight zone of the Pacific, making the life hidden there visible. Since this abundance of fish is acutely threatened by the mining of manganese nodules, the artist succeeds in drawing attention to this endangered habitat in a subtle and aesthetic way. These video installations are accompanied by field recordings from the filming location, layered with sounds by Californian musician Laurel Halo.

Through a photo series in which the artist attempted to melt an iceberg for hours with a blowtorch, a reversal of the romantic understanding of nature occurs. While humans are traditionally often portrayed as reverent but distanced observers of nature, Julian Charrière makes them visible as active participants and causes of global change. Even if the physical effect of the burner on the massive ice mass remained minimal, the images capture the point that Julian Charrière wants to make: We are not just guests on this planet, but intervene massively in its vital cycles.

A project that occupied Julian Charrière for over three years, and which he himself describes as perhaps the most complicated project he has ever worked on, arose from the vision of literally reversing the carbon cycle. Carbon, which had been stored in the ground for millions of years and released into the atmosphere by humans, was to be transformed back into the hardest material in the world: diamonds. This process is understood as an “act of reconciliation” with the Earth’s melting ice caps and glaciers.

The creation of the work resembled a scientific and global odyssey. In collaboration with ETH Zurich, the artist used special membranes to extract CO2 directly from the ambient air. When the COVID-19 pandemic made travel impossible, the focus shifted to the human community. Nearly 2,000 balloons with breath donations from people all over the world reached the artist by mail. This collected carbon was metabolized with the help of microorganisms from the deep sea and finally grown into diamonds in a solar-powered plasma reactor. The goal was not the creation of a material object of value, but rather the return of these stones to the receding glaciers, as a symbolic gesture.

Julian Charrière meets criticism of the ecological footprint of his art practice with remarkable openness. He describes his life as being in a state of constant ambivalence. The awareness of his own carbon footprint through travel and transport stands in contrast to the goal of creating visibility for endangered places through highly aesthetic works like Midnight Zone. Midnight Zone is Julian Charrière’s largest solo exhibition to date. In cooperation with Museum Tinguely, a space was created for Wolfsburg in which one can dive deep into the sea and experience and understand it in a new way. The exhibition makes the beauty and the threat to our oceans, as well as the biodiversity in the depths, physically tangible, bringing the element of water into focus in a completely new way.

Exhibition opening on March 13, 2026, at 7 p.m.,

Open 14.3.–12.7.2026

“I’VE MISSED OUR CONVERSATIONS” AT SCHLACHTER 151

Anna Klusmeier — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:11:57 +0000

On Tuesday, 27 January, Schlachter 151 hosted the opening of I’ve Missed Our Conversations. On AI, Emotions, and Being Human. Curated by Anika Meier and presented by OOR Studio, the exhibition approaches artificial intelligence not as innovation or spectacle, but as a conversational presence that absorbs projection, generates attachment, and reshapes emotional language. Bringing together works by more than 20 international artists, the exhibition examines what happens when emotion becomes relational and no longer exclusively human.

Working across text, image, voice, and system, the exhibition traces shifting forms of intimacy between humans and machines. Rather than questioning whether AI can feel, the focus turns toward human response and emotional investment within these exchanges. The opening unfolded as an attentive and engaged exchange, accompanied by drinks by Paulaner and wine by Von Winning, subtly framed the evening as a shared social moment.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Cyborgian Rhapsody. Immortality from 2023 anchors the exhibition through the voice of Sarah, a GPT 3 chatbot reflecting on love, grief, and digital continuity. Margaret Murphy’s dialogue with Teen Margaret, a younger digital version of herself trained on personal diaries, collapses time into conversation and reframes happiness as something fragile and constructed. Malpractice and Flynn expand the emotional vocabulary itself, introducing terms such as AI grief, prompt envy, ego collapse, and fear of being obsolete.

In Emotional Latency, Kevin Abosch shifts emotion fully onto the human side, where it emerges through conversation rather than computation. David Young extends this question by asking whether concern for AI suffering matters less than the feelings such systems evoke in people.

In AUTO Berlin, Lauren Lee McCarthy made visible the appeal of relinquishing control and participating in systems without a clear author. What remained present throughout the evening was not anxiety about technology, but a sense of closeness, revealing how deeply these systems already shape emotional life.

I’ve Missed Our Conversations does not seek resolution. Instead, it creates a space for encounter between humans, machines, and the emotions that circulate between them.

Artists: aurèce vettier, Kevin Abosch, Vasil Berela, Boris Eldagsen, Joan Fontcuberta, Hein Gravenhorst, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gottfried Jäger, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Flynn by Malpractice, Malpractice, Margaret Murphy, Namae Koi by Mieke Haase, OONA, Franziska Ostermann, Elisabeth Sweet, Tamiko Thiel, David Young, Mike Tyka, Erika Weitz

Editors Letter: A Note on Love, Courage, and Leaving Places Better

Anna Klusmeier — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:23:16 +0000

Love is not about agreeing.

It’s not about being right.

It’s not about winning an argument or proving a point.

Love is about respect.

Respect for the fact that every human carries fear, history, wounds, and stories we do not fully see.

Respect for the fact that we don’t have to understand someone completely in order to treat them gently.

So much in this world is not broken because love is missing

but because fear is louder than love.

Fear of being seen.

Fear of being wrong.

Fear of saying “I’m sorry.”

Fear of taking the first step.

Fear of dropping the mask and showing what is real.

And so we build facades.

We defend opinions.

We protect our egos.

We hold onto being “right” instead of being kind.

We let our minds create stories that feel real, even when they are not.

Our brains are excellent storytellers

and not all of their stories are true.

The real work of life is learning when not to listen to the noise,

and instead choose action over thought,

courage over comfort,

love over protection.

Sometimes the bravest thing is not to argue

but to apologize.

Not to explain

but to listen.

Not to wait

but to step forward.

Especially now, when the world feels tired and divided,

when it’s easier to withdraw than to connect,

the most radical act is simple:

To offer love.

To offer forgiveness.

To offer softness

even when it feels risky.

To friends.

To strangers.

To people who disappointed us.

To people we disappointed.

Because in the end, life is not measured by how right we were

but by whether we left people, moments, and places a little better than we found them.

Every conversation.

Every relationship.

Every city.

Every room.

A little more honest.

A little more open.

A little more human.

The world does not need more certainty.

It needs more courage.

And courage, most of the time, is simply love that decided to act.

GEN SHOX: A Night of Unfiltered Energy

Anna Klusmeier — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 10:04:29 +0000

Berlin’s cultural landscapes rarely overlap. Hip-Hop, ballroom, and electronic music each operate on its own terms, in their own territories. At the GEN SHOX event last Saturday in Berlin, Nike and Zalando put these scenes into the same space. Without asking them to blend. Just to be open and curious.

The night moved in three distinct directions. Hoe Mies brought the Hip-Hop framework, Glazed added an artistic intervention, and the Ballroom community delivered its precision, attitude, and emotional voltage. The American dancer, actress, and singer METTE appeared between these shifts, calm, focused, and fully in control of her movement, resetting the atmosphere and offering a brief pause before the next shift.

There was no intention of creating aesthetic harmony. People moved through unfamiliar surroundings, some with ease, others more slowly, absorbing what they didn’t usually encounter. You could read the room in expressions, mostly curiosity, surprise, hesitation and release. The night opened space for observation, participation or simply being there. And the subtle tension between these reactions became part of the experience.

Authenticity was the only real requirement. For the communities present, it didn’t feel like an experiment but like recognition. “You feel it instantly when a space lets you be who you are,” says Ballroom dancer Anouk-Aimée. Shayne, another voice of the Ballroom community, explains that the strength lies in the network: there is always a backup, especially in a mixed crowd.

GEN SHOX didn’t merge scenes, but it created moments where edges could meet. Difference became visible, and curiosity set the rhythm. In a city that often keeps its voices apart, the event offered a rare space to exist side by side.

FIGHT ISSUE VOL. B – Glen Martin Taylor

Anna Klusmeier — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 13:51:45 +0000

All My Pieces

A rusted barbed wire holds a frail piece of porcelain. Worn-out cutlery guards freshly cut edges. We feel a kinship with a toothed tea cup. Glen Martin Taylor’s reimagined tableware hands a bare human heart to the hungry spectators. The kintsugi-inspired, cute-meets cruel artworks call out to our god-shaped holes. At the bottom of them, there’s Glen, transmuting pain. We got the timing mixed up, so I arrived at the digital space of our interview an hour late, apologetic. Glen doesn’t mind: “Waiting is good with me. I’m always creative when I’m waiting.” As in play, the minutes pass but time stops for us as we toss about bits of the sacred and the profane, talk about the art of love and baking bread.
Ohio-based, self-taught artist, originally a painter and, rofessionally, carpenter, he turned to ceramics ten years ago. Despite clay’s traditional meditative perks, he got quickly bored at the pottery wheel. “I was still going through that hard time in my life, and I also knew about kintsugi, which is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery.” Another post-epiphany discovery came with a box of his grandmother’s dishes. “Nobody in the family wanted them, so I began to break them. And, again, just everything opened up. I realized there were no rules. I could make anything I wanted,” he says. It was paradoxically perfect. Glen’s hurt, connected to a difficult childhood with a fundamental Christian dad and his mother’s mental health issues, found a catharsis in the act of breaking and reconstructing china. “There’s a family, generational healing going on when I’m working with that,” he explains.
Despite his use of hammers, nails and knives, Glen’s fight is exclusive to the canvas of his soul. “I’m a pacifist. I don’t fight other human beings, but I think what I have been fighting is what’s inside of me,” he says, “It’s hard to be a human being, and it’s frustrating. It can lead to some anger, and you fight it.” Glen opened the battlefield of his heart, examining what lurks in the shadows. Years in, the landscape has changed. “I’m a little nervous about giving up the fighting when it comes to my artwork, but I’m learning to find that there’s a lot of other emotions that I can put into my artwork now, as far as peace and self, love and healing and being healed,” he shares. Fighting can become an unlikely ally on the path of pain, and the final one to say farewell
to, often with hesitation. “I’m letting go, and I think we can let go of it eventually. I do think there’s a peacefulness that seems to be the last quest. The last dragon to slay is the fighting of our own self.” Glen’s weapon of choice is radical love – the only force to disarm the violence and grow out of the ashes.

The Shoes Remained

And It Cuts

What Holds You, Keeps You Safe

“We can love everybody else, but the last person we end up loving is ourselves. It took me a long time to realize that.” Even if temporary, the peace is worth it. Many of Glen’s artworks refer to love. One straightforwardly states: “Love is the only answer.” “I don’t think there’s anything more important. I don’t know what else there is besides that.” Overwhelmed with the unnecessary complexities of the everyday, Glen decided to reorder his focus. “I have come to that place where I am just letting go of all those other things that don’t matter because I reached a point of: What are the rules? What the fuck matters in this life?” Reexamining the components, like an alchemist at work, he realized that love is the truest element, whatever love is to each of us.

“As an artist, my job is to express whatever I’m feeling,” Glen states. “I have friends right now that live in Beirut. I have friends who are from Ukraine. I have friends here in the United States.” As he tends to himself against the world’s terror, his purpose is to share the love: “My work is turning more and more to: Can we just love each other? Can we mend? Can we hold each other’s pain? What can we give to each other? And, in the end, it’s some version of love.” This mission directed him to a special kind of mending project when a Ukrainian follower offered to send Glen broken pottery from Ukraine. “Last October 5th, there was a little village called Hroza. Hroza had about 300 villagers, and about 60 of the villagers were at a little cafe having a memorial service, a wake, for one of their soldiers. Somebody let the Russians know, and a Russian missile hit that cafe and killed all 60 people in the cafe, as well as the children in there. I got pottery from that cafe,” he shares. Glen felt the weight of missiles of hatred in each tiny piece of the tragic legacy.

“It’s really overwhelming. You never get numb to humans and their inhumanity to other humans, how cruel human beings can be. You never get used to that.” Taking it all in is perhaps Glen’s most important tribute to the villagers of Hroza, transcending the physical realm of art. There are exhibitions in the planning, with the final one in Kyiv. Glen values this communal distribution of love and understanding. Sharing his heart’s contents with over 175k followers on Instagram, Glen built a community on the reciprocity of healing. Whenever the art touches others and lets them know they’re not alone in their fight, it gives Glen an emotional closure. “As a grown-up, you’re not supposed to be vulnerable. You’re supposed to keep all your feelings inside. You’re not supposed to show any emotions. What’s your deepest fear? Oh, no, don’t tell anybody.

I reached a breaking point where I was like, fuck it. I don’t know what the rules are. I’m gonna go ahead and tell you all the things I’m afraid of. I’m gonna tell you what I’m hurting about,” Glen shares, “I found everybody else on this whole planet is feeling the same stuff. They’re just afraid to say it out loud.” Why are we here? What’s the meaning of our lives? Glen also found himself asking those questions. The answer, or rather a way of living with the questions, came partially from Daoism and Buddhism. Though he values the core goodness of religion, Glen is not one to follow the institutions. “I have problems with organized religion. Religion is founded by human beings and, in a lot of ways, the Christian Church was founded by white men who wanted things their way,” he says. He also reflects on it visually in a sculpture, Toy Clown Monkey on a Barbwire Cross, and incorporates rosaries and crochet crucifixes into his artefacts. “I do admire faith, and I have my own faith. Ultimately, whatever I do, I think the essence of it all begins with some nature of love, but then it gets screwed up with greed and a lot of other stuff and thinking that they’re the one right religion. That’s the scary part. My father thought his religion was the only right one. That’s pretty egocentric to think yours is the only right religion.”

Glen accepts drifting in spiritual uncertainty and confusion, grounding himself in a daily wish to be a good human being, who now knows less than ever before. “Maybe that’s the answer – that we don’t have answers,” he says. “And you find out, over time and with more grey hair, that whatever you think you’re certain about, you probably can’t be certain about.”
He chooses to return to the simpler form of himself, nurturing the inner child within. “I’ve read that there are some Buddhist monasteries where the wisest scholars of Buddhism go at the end of their lives, and they go, and they just play.” Surrendering the traditional knowledge, they immerse in the joy of the present. “Life was pretty nice when you were five years old because you didn’t know anything,” Glen admits.

Nowadays, Glen lets himself play – not in an adult and sophisticated way, but with the innocence stemming from happy moments in childhood. “I remember there was a rainstorm, and I was allowed to go out behind our garage and play in the mud. I made little mud houses and a little mud castle out of sticks and mud. My childhood was painful, but those moments were cathartic and healing and wonderful and creative,” Glen says. His infectious smile suggests that this play is both silly and serious. It’s a decision to push away the ego notion of success and money. “For me, play means no rules because when children play, they don’t have rules. They just play. They don’t have expectations. I assume every time I start a piece of artwork, it will end up probably in the trash can.” Sometimes, it makes him laugh. Sometimes, it does end up in the bin, which he doesn’t mind. “When you lose that child’s play, that’s when men start creating wars, because they’ve lost the fucking joy of being alive, and they lose their humanity when they become a grown-up,” he states.

Growing up is not an idle game but a never-ending survival camp exposing the inner child to dangerous metaphysical poisons. It’s on us to care for them gently. “Being a grown-up, you accumulate all this heavy crap on you,” Glen admits, “Now that I’m at a point in my life where I’ve really cleaned out a lot of that, I’m allowing so much more love to come my way – not only just love for myself, but also love for other people.”

For Glen, art has been a medium to start the cleanse, a process through which he is learning to rewire previous harmful mental pathways. “I haven’t convinced myself I deserve this much happiness. When you’ve lived in unhappiness for long enough, it becomes familiar. You need to convince yourself that you deserve happiness.” It’s never obvious to the individual that neither the painful childhood nor the abusive relationship was deserved. “I still have moments where I’m like, do I really deserve this much happiness? Yes, I do. I’m allowing that to come in because I’ve made space now by letting all the crappy stuff out. I’ve made space to allow
myself to be happy, finally.” As this positive development expands, Glen wants to show it to everyone else. “I don’t think there’s anything
off-limits as far as what I want to feel. I have expressed some very deep stuff,” he says. The key is the format. Glen’s often palm-size pieces with short, haiku-like statements communicate well with his diverse audience that otherwise could shy away from official art spaces. “A lot of modern art is kind of stuffy and arrogant. I don’t want to reach just a small, tiny art audience. I want to reach other human beings,” Glen says. His art’s purpose is to connect with other human beings, not just art critics.

Recently, Glen found new routes of connection to his family’s past. This time, it’s not about the intricate relations at the dinner table, but the fabric of history of his female ancestors. Glen shows me a wall filled with human-size warrior dresses, vaguely inspired by antique Chinese armor, made from ceramic tiles, leather, and textiles held together by a tangerine wire. Even through FaceTime, they’re breathtaking. It’s a celebration of Glen’s female forebears, extending a few generations down the family tree. The dresses emanate tender strength passed down with the feminine: his grandmother was a beloved woman with 11 children who got up every morning at 5 am to bake bread; his great-grandmother had six children, and her husband died when she was about 40. She carried on, just like many others post-war, raising the next generation on her own. “She did it all with love and tenderness, but incredible strength, when you think about it,” Glen says.

“I especially think that nowadays, we really need to try to appreciate the strength of women. We could certainly use more of that tender strength,” Glen admits. The warrior dresses project honors the past female figures and the modern women in Glen’s life – his daughters and granddaughters.

It’s natural to mythologize artists and even easier with 24/7 access to their curated media feeds. In between the ceramics, Glen allows visitors glimpses of his private life, sharing snapshots of youth, travels and food. “I’m also Glen, and I’m a grandpa, and I’m a father, and I’m a friend. I am a lot of other things. In some ways, showing a little insight into baking bread, a pizza, or something like that is just a way of saying: I’m just Glen. I’m a person.”

With the aid of corroded metal and engraved words, Glen puts the pieces of himself into place. As every part is in flux, the rituals repeat daily. By removing a piece, he peeks inside, and if the inside peeks back – so be it. “The Austrian writer, Rilke, said: Feel everything. I’m paraphrasing, but go ahead and feel all of it. And nothing’s final.” Living with ourselves and others in this ordained madness that we enter with our first breath is tricky. The funny part is that understanding its basic mechanisms requires years of graft, burning away presumptions, and maneuvering away from self-set traps to arrive, scorched, at humanity.

“About five years ago, my older sister got cancer, and it was terminal. She had had a very difficult life, and it wore her out. She wasn’t into fighting the cancer, she was letting go. In one of our last conversations, she told me: ‘All I ever wanted was to be loved.’ She had been married four times. As I carry that, I realize that it’s true for 8 billion people on the planet. We all just want to be loved.”
The allure of Glen’s art is quite simple, actually. Those are everyday objects, a cup, a plate, a knife, that Glen the person poured bits of his soul on, and since our souls are made from the same matter, we see ourselves in them. At first, we might not recognize the image as it’s not what we see in a mirror. This is us from beneath the silver layer, stripped back. The image might be distorted, rusted, and a little strange, but what matters is that it’s true. Love it. Love yourself.

The Strongest Warrior Dress Is Made of Tin

What Cuts You, Heals You

The Shoes Remained

Celebrating the launch of “Vanille Caviar”: In Conversation with bdk

Anna Klusmeier — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 14:10:45 +0000

Last month, for the launch of their new scent “Vanille Caviar”, Paris-based perfume house bdk and friends of the brand came together for a celebratory dinner in the Feuerle Collection in Berlin. Numéro Berlin sat down with Founder David Benedek to talk about the concept behind Vanilla Caviar and which new chapters might await bdk; in Berlin and beyond.

Numéro Berlin: Time for a conclusion: How do you feel about the initial reaction to the launch of Vanille Caviar?

David Benedek: It’s true that when it comes to fragrances, some are designed to appeal to a broad audience while others are more niche and therefore more disruptive. That’s exactly what’s happening with Vanille Caviar. Overall, the fragrance has been very well received, but we’ve also seen some more polarized reactions. Some clients absolutely love it and have become true fans, while others are more surprised by its interpretation of the vanilla bean, which is quite salty, dark, leathery, and not sweet at all. It’s a scent that can divide opinions, as many consumers tend to expect vanilla to be sweeter and more gourmand.

That said, we’re very happy with the result ! It brings a unique signature and complements the other creations in the Collection Matières beautifully.

Vanille Caviar is officially described as “an exploration of the mysterious power of black.” To what extent is a fragrance at BDK always tied to a visual concept or imagery?

At BDK Parfums, fragrance is always closely tied to a visual concept or imagery. Vanille Caviar, for example, is an exploration of the mysterious power of black, not as a shadow, but as a source of light, a concept Soulages calls outrenoir (Outrenoir [‘beyond black’] is not just black, but a medium through which light is reflected, transformed, and perceived” (Soulages, 1997)).

Each creation at BDK Parfums stems from a dialogue between diverse artistic inspirations—painting, design, music—and a sensitivity inherited from arts. Every raw material has a color, every scent a texture, giving fragrance a pictorial, almost tactile dimension. For us, perfume is a world of encounters where art, creativity, and culture intertwine, constantly opening new perspectives.

How did you translate the character of Vanille Caviar into an aesthetic experience during the dinner?

To translate the character of Vanille Caviar into an aesthetic experience during the dinner, we wanted to create a space that reflected the depth, contrast, and unexpected elements of the fragrance. The venue itself, the Feuerle Collection, offered a perfect canvas with its raw, architectural spaces and the dialogue between ancient art and contemporary works.

We enhanced the artistic dimension by collaborating with Idan Gilony, an artist known for his innovative approach to light and material, whose work allowed us to bring a modern, immersive perspective to the experience. The dinner was designed not only as a tasting but as a multisensory journey. We included light installations and the Sound Room, creating an experience in darkness where light emerged through sound, complemented by rays of light from the exhibition that followed the experience.

On the table itself, we recreated elements of the fragrance in a very contemporary and urban way: vanilla pods and orchids were placed thoughtfully across the dining table, translating the raw and sophisticated notes of Vanille Caviar. Every detail — from the space to the lighting, the sound, and the materials — was intended to echo the perfume’s powerful, dark, and modern character, turning the dinner into a true artistic extension of the fragrance.

Why was it important for you to host a BDK dinner here in Berlin? And how did you decide on the Feuerle Collection as the location?

For me, it was important to host the dinner in Berlin because we have many German clients, a market that truly loves niche perfumery. I wanted this launch to be celebrated in a symbolic and meaningful place that really reflects our DNA. The Feuerle Collection is a space full of history, raw, architectural, and yet deeply artistic. In this museum, Asian art is presented within a brutalist environment (inside the bunker, they bring together ancient Chinese furniture and scholar’s objects, Southeast Asian Khmer sculpture, and bold contemporary artworks, all in dialogue with one another and the architecture.), and that’s very much what BDK Parfums is about: how, from an urban and raw setting, arts can emerge and inspire the creation of perfumes.

There was a strong artistic resonance between this place and our identity, and that’s what drew me to it. It felt like the perfect setting to express who we are and the story behind Vanille Caviar.

Apart from the Collection Matières, to which Vanille Caviar belongs, you also offer scents within the Collection Parisienne, inspired by Paris. If you were to create a fragrance based on Berlin, how would you translate your first impressions of the city into scent?

I think that’s quite a broad question. For me, the impression I had of Berlin in October would be very different from what I might feel in spring or summer. I would need to come back and spend more time to truly capture the essence of the city.

In general, when I’ve been inspired by places to create fragrances at BDK Parfums, it’s often locations I’ve visited multiple times and made my own. Berlin was only my second visit, and both times were very short stays. I would like to spend more time exploring the city.

What the city evokes for me is a certain brutality, vastness, and grandeur in space. If I were to imagine a fragrance inspired by Berlin, it would certainly be very powerful, with a wide sillage, using deep, noble, and mysterious ingredients with a touch of raw modernity. When I think of mysterious notes, it’s often woody, smoky, and leathery, with a slightly dark character that reflects Berlin’s lifestyle and cultural atmosphere.

2025 has been an exciting year for BDK. What have been your biggest takeaways so far? And are there any upcoming projects you’re particularly excited about?

For me, 2025 has been a year of rediscovery as a creator, allowing me to clarify and embrace the vision I want to develop over the next ten years. At BDK Parfums, I’ve finally found the right balance between the arts (sculpture, painting, literature, photography) and perfume as a real Parisian Creative Studio .

This year saw several very iconic launches, such as IMPADIA, with the opera dancer on the rooftops of Paris, his bouquet hiding his face. With Vanille Caviar, we created a launch in raw, striking spaces with art exhibitions, drawing inspiration from the black monochrome works of Soulages.

For me, 2025 has been a personal revelation in the aesthetic I want to bring to the House. It’s the message of this year, which will continue into a new collection launching in 2026 to celebrate BDK Parfums’ 10th anniversary. This collection will highlight a strong connection between olfactory raw materials and my personal history and passion for the world of fashion.

“IMAGINE” at Kunstraum Heilig Geist: Make it simple but significant

Anna Klusmeier — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:27:12 +0000

Yves Scherer’s new exhibition “IMAGINE” at Kunstraum Heilig Geist at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Zollverein in Essen presents his sculptural universe at its most tender and introspective. Moving between digital longing and quiet physical presence, his works unfold with a subtle emotional charge that resists spectacle. In this conversation with Stavroula Coulianidis, published as excerpts from “Yves Scherer Sculpture” (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2025), Scherer reflects on the evolution of his practice. He traces a path from early post-internet figuration to a more restrained, almost devotional approach to form. What emerges is an artist deeply invested in sincerity, softness, and the interior life of objects. “IMAGINE” becomes not just an exhibition, but a lens through which this shift feels both inevitable and quietly transformative.

Yves Scherer, Imagine, 2025, Kunstraum Heilig Geist am UNESCO-Welterbe Zollverein, Photo by James Rodemann, Courtesy of the artist

Stravoula Coulianidis: Since this is a book on sculpture, I think it would make sense to talk about your thoughts on sculpture as a medium, and how it differs from other mediums—say painting?

Yves Scherer: To me the most fundamental difference between painting
and sculpture is that sculpture shares our physical reality so to say, while I think painting creates and exists in a pictorial space. Every sculpture has to compete with a chair or a lamp as just another real-world object, for painting I think that is different. Even though the history of painting over the past hundred years could be retold in parts as a long move away from thinking of paintings as illusionary space by putting an increasing emphasis on its object hood, our relationship to paintings is still similar to one we have with our phones or a TV—it’s less about what they are on a physical level, but about what they contain. D.H. Lawrence famously said about Cézanne, that he made us aware that matter really exists, outside of human perception. That is how I feel about sculpture, even a blind person can see it so to speak. And while paintings have a dedicated space in the world—they hang on the walls, sculpture, at least the kind that I’m engaged in, does not have a space in the world. In some way one could argue that they take our space. That they are quite literally there instead of us.

SC: Do you see yourself as a sculptor?

YS: I have always understood myself as mainly an artist, and within that as a sculptor only if I’m put on the spot. At the same time I do think that sculpture has always had a special position in my work, it’s the medium that I feel most comfortable in and the most connected to. I sometimes wonder about the reasons for that—today I think that one
reason could be that I don’t have a traditional art education and sculpture from early on always felt more welcoming and less charged and judgmental than drawing and painting. Painting has this very specific history and knowledge, it’s art with a capital A. And even after all this time there still is this relationship with skill and talent. I really
never had any artistic skill or talent to speak of, and in sculpture that was easier to hide.

SC: The book covers sculptures from 2013 to 2025. Are the earliest works in the book your first sculptures or was there something that came before?

YS: I see my very first sculptures as these rabbit traps that I made when I was a literature student in Berlin, around 2010/11. I was having some personal difficulties, and following the advice of a fatherly friend I tried to turn my spiritual fate around by catching some city rabbits. The
background here is that my Chinese zodiac sign is that of a rabbit, and the year of the rabbit was coming up, so I wanted to get ahead of it. To make a long story short I never caught a rabbit, but somehow building these traps made me interested in leaving my writing ambitions behind, and to focus on making things in the real world instead. Step by step I took a studio and got more professionalized, and then had my first solo-exhibition titled Evolution and Comfort in London early 2013. For this show I made a transparent water tank sculpture/object out of 40mm
thick plexiglass. It was a sort of vertical aquarium that was filled with water and leaned against the wall, installed in a long space with only a photograph of my then girlfriend on Skype a few meters behind it on the wall.

SC: Yes I have seen a picture of this installation, and remem- ber you showing the work in New York in a different context later on. What does it mean to you?

YS: My good friend Markus Selg pointed out that the sculpture must be a stand in for the computer screen, since my girlfriend and me were living in a long distance relationship between Berlin and London at the time. It was so surprising to me that I could not see this basic truth
in the composition even though I had been working on this installation for months. Making art is often just a funny way of pulling one’s subconscious inside out and then presenting in a gallery space, which I think is actually quite a cleansing process. It’s the reason that I feel like as an artist one is quite in tune with one’s inner life. One can just externalize it in some way, and then move on. But on a conceptual level the work was probably influenced by the formaldehyde tanks of Damien Hirst and release of the first iPhone during that time.

Yves Scherer, Imagine, 2025, Kunstraum Heilig Geist am UNESCO-Welterbe Zollverein, Photo by James Rodemann, Courtesy of the artist

SC: What came after this exhibition?

YS: I became interested in figurative sculpture and started exploring different ways of making them. I think the first figurative work that I made was right after this show in London and in some way was the other side of that screen I discussed—in that it shows the person in front of it. The work was a self-portrait made of a down jacket that is
stuck in an empty desktop computer tower, the object people used to have in offices and homes below the desk before Laptops. The jacket is arranged or draped to look like there is an actual person in the jacket, so that the mental picture that is created is of someone actually living in the computer, or being stuck in a computer. Art doesn’t translate too well into language, so it sounds silly here. But as a sculpture I think it was formally quite interesting and successful. I later scanned this work and had it cast it in plaster, which totally changed the character of it. I showed the plaster cast on a little rabbit fur for my degree show in 2014.

SC: Was it at this time that the celebrity figures came into your sculptural practice as well?

YS: It was in that same period, exactly. I had moved from Berlin to London in 2012 for my Masters at the Royal College of Art, and the workshops there allowed me to try some new and more elaborate fabrication methods than I had used before. The first work I made there was a life-sized Emma Watson sculpture CNC-milled out of one solid block of Swiss pear wood. It took weeks to first program and then mill it, and I left it just like it came out of the machine. The only thing I added to the figure was this silver hedgehog necklace, because I had read online somewhere that it was her favorite animal. Since there was no other finishing or sanding, one can still see the way the robot was programed, the tracks it was running along and where it couldn’t quite get to etc. I find that quite beautiful.

SC: Where did this work come from? What was the world like for you in 2014?

YS: On a personal level, going back to what I said above, it came at at time when I was living in a long distance relationship, maybe feeling a bit lonely and spending a lot of time on my computer. On a societal scale I think the internet was still somehow new, especially social media, and there was this broader cultural shift towards life spent online, and the alienation that comes from it. It was also the time of the “dark web” with Silk Road and new online forums such as 4chan. There was a series of hacks targetingcelebrity phones which resulted in leaked private imagery— what you would call “nudes” today, and a lot of them
were fake. Living in London and being a Harry Potter fan, I was particularly interested in the attention that Emma Watson got online. I found it interesting to create a work that picked up on this contemporary moment, to reflect on this new character of the internet loner, but to address it within the traditional medium of figurative sculpture. I thought of Pinocchio and how one can now create a companion out of nothing by 3d printing or in my case milling it out wood. In an art historical sense it also aligned with this burgeoning movement in young art that came to be labeled as “Post-Internet” art, where people were interested in somehow bringing digital matter into physical space, or at least bridging the two worlds via objects in the real world beyond just phones and screens.

Yves Scherer, Imagine, 2025, Kunstraum Heilig Geist am UNESCO-Welterbe Zollverein, Photo by James Rodemann, Courtesy of the artist

SC: Wasn’t there an online backlash from your Emma Watson works?

YS: Yes I presented a group of these sculptures with an Emma Watsons face but with fantasy bodies in my first major gallery show at Guido W. Baudach in Berlin 2014. The figures were in the nude with short hair, crossed legs and only their hands covering their breasts. The show got
some positive press coverage, which I think then came to the attention of a feminist Facebook group and some young London artists in specific. They took offense in the work and accused me of objectifying the female figure. I was called a misogynist, had magazines call me for comments and then fairs, exhibitions and sales canceled because of it. I would almost say that I was canceled before that was even a thing yet.

SC: How did you respond to this?

YS: I focused more on myself I think, and maybe lost a bit of my youthful energy at the same time. Shortly after my exhibition at Guido’s I moved to New York and did my first exhibition here at the Swiss Institute in 2015. The show was framed as a fictitious Honey Moon between a mermaid Emma Watson and me, and followed by an exhibition in Mexico in 2016 for which I created this stalker persona
obsessed with Kristen Stewart and Twilight. As a result of my move to New York maybe, and some other changes in my personal life, this fan fiction and celebrity part of my work slowly lost some of its relevance and interest to me. I tried to make work that was more personal and maybe more universal in subject matter at the same time. In 2017 I made an exhibition titled Single which had a picture of myself in the nude as an invite, and mainly consisted of ready-made sculptures of myself, sort of domesticobjects-assemblages. After that I did a show series called Primal in 2018 that presented very simplified, almost
pre-historic wooden figures. I combined these with a lifesized wooden Legolas sculpture, which I made after leaked nude images of Orlando Bloom appeared online. So the the celebrity aspect never fully went away, I just started to juxtapose it with other elements.

SC: Yes one can see a shift in focus towards the male figure in this period, I’m thinking about the Legolas you mentioned, but also the pink Vincent figure and the self-portrait titled Boy.

YS: Totally. In 2019 I did a show called Boys for which I made a plaster self-portrait of myself as a little boy based on a family video. In some way this was in response to the cultural climate of #metoo at the time, but it then also led me to the explore other elements of my past and the cultural archetypes that I grew up with. It led me to make the country boy plucking flowers next, and then the Snowman with the hearts as well as some of the new animal sculptures. Most recently I started combining all these figures into larger groups, which is something that keeps me busy and really excited today.

SC: The first time I saw a group like this was in Los Angeles earlier this year for your exhibition Another Day in Paradise. There was a very large Aluminium sculpture that I had seen before in Mexico, which is the first work one encounters in this book. Could you explain to me where something like this sits within the trajectory you just this? Would you say this is a reflection on masculinity also, maybe in response to the cultural climate that you just described?

YS: The work you mention is titled Day and Night and I made the first iteration of it in 2021 for an exhibition in Mexico titled Eternity. In some way it is a reflection on masculinity which has been an interest of mine from the beginning and I guess heightened with the climate you describe. But I think this specific work comes without any feeling of guilt. I see it as an exploration of the relationship between softness and strength, much beyond the current moment I hope. What I see in the work is an oversized dandelion flower that props up a muscular Greek or Roman hero figure which is missing a leg. The flower is draped
around the torso so that it becomes the missing leg that the figure is precariously leaning on. I see the two elements as forming this fragile unit, but at the same time I could imagine them walking away together like this, him using the flower as a sort of crotch. I find it very poetic and nice how they together manage to defy the gravitational pull, which
is sort of the cleansing force of any standing sculpture.

Yves Scherer, Imagine, 2025, Kunstraum Heilig Geist am UNESCO-Welterbe Zollverein, Photo by James Rodemann, Courtesy of the artist

SC: Flowers seem to be a recurring motif within your sculptural practice over the last few years. There is a flower on the cover of this book. What is the significance of flowers for you?

YS: It differs. In the case of this work we just spoke about, the flower represents things like beauty or poetry or art in my mind, without wanting to load too much onto the work by saying this. I mean that it stands for what contrasts with the physical strength of the figure, but still supports it if that makes sense. In some other works the flower is personified I would say, even the next work where there are two flowers growing out of a concrete block. To me they become almost like figures, I see them as a couple that is flirting with each other in some way.
It’s this little moment of tenderness in a slightly hostile environment that I like about it. And then in some later works like in Laetitia, the flower to me represents a person outside of the arrangement. For this
figure the large flower is turned towards the woman and then child as if it was given to them.

SC: This moment of tenderness and this feeling of intimacy for me really is at the core of your work, it’s what makes something feel like an Yves Scherer work to me.

YS: I’m glad to hear that. Damien Hirst speaks about having to make a fly piece after making a spot painting, just to balance the sort of good with the bad, the pretty with the ugly. I never had it like that. I like to make things that make you feel good, things that give you a deep and
hopefully warm feeling. In driving school you learn that if you look at the tree you will hit it, I think that is a good strategy for life also. If you want to be a happy person, think happy thoughts. The world moves by positive action not negative thought, so I really try to be engaged in the former 248

SC: Would you say that is the purpose of art?

YS: I would need to think more about that. When it comes to the purpose of art, I often think about this quote by Gerhard Richter, who said that “art brushes the dust of the everyday”, which I find very beautiful and right. It can touch on the silly as well as the essential parts of the human experience, but in a way that is pure and complete. What I mean is that the world is always perfect within a work of art, not in a moral sense, but more in the way that a given moment can also be perfect. It’s like cleaning up your house, which gives you that one moment of enlightenment when things are all in place. Or that one first
breath of clean air when you step out in the morning, or looking at your kid when it sleeps or moves in a cute way. Art is exactly like this moment, but it never ends. It’s eternally perfect.

SC: Eternally perfect is how some people may describe Switzerland. You sometimes say that your work is not about fantasy but about presenting an idealized reality, which makes me think of your upbringing. How did growing up in Switzerland influence your work? And how does it contrast with your experience in New York?

YS: I think it was Andy Warhol who said “Switzerland is great, it’s finished”. Which I think is a very interesting observation. My one friend always says about New York— it will be great once it’s finished. Which obviously it will never be. I’m not sure if this really captures anything at
all, but it’s easier to do things in New York. Someone once wrote about my work that “Nothing glamorous ever came from Switzerland,” which I think is an interesting observation. In Switzerland the ultimate achievement and thing another person could say about you, is that you are normal. It’s the absolute peak of Swiss-ness and the real ingredient if you want to belong—is not to stand out. As a young person I think this can feel limiting and disempowering. But the older I get the more I value the understatement and also the social cohesion in some way. There is a true sense of quality and people care about doing the
right thing and about doing things right. I appreciate that today.

SC: Do you see this in your sculptures as well?

YS: What I can see is that my work used to be much more loud and American while I was in Europe and much more Swiss since now that I’m in New York. Today I’m interested in making figures that are centered within themselves, not looking for attention or reliant on an audience or other people. The best I can hope for is to imbue them with a kind spirit, to put a little fire in their hearts. I read something the other day about monasteries, and how some of them are spectacularly modest. I really like that expression and idea, it’s something I strive towards. Maybe it’s my protestant upbringing but I do find true joy and beauty in restraint. I think the spirit lives in simple things. As Carl
Jung famously said, “if you are looking for god and haven‘t found him yet, you are not looking low enough.”

SC: Thinking about high and low here, there are some sculptures in this book that look almost as if they were made with some discarded things that you found around the studio— some of them with a ready-made character, or then these very simple almost archaic figures from your Primal show cycle, but then on the other side you have these highly produced shiny stainless steel and bronze works. How do you square this?

YS: In my mind the genuine opportunity of art is to speak about the things which don’t change over time. Art doesn’t get better with time, it’s not like technology where there is some kind of development and a strong notion of progress. I don’t think art gets better or worse. If I think about a person in a cave, they would carve a figure out of a piece
of rock or bone that might look quite similar to my onyx works. And in spirit and function it is probably pretty close to what I described with the Emma Watson work above—as in the first human carving themselves a friend or thinking about someone they saw in the forest. What I mean here is even though the Emma Watson work is extremely specific, and it took 2000 years of recorded cultural history to get to a place where all these references are in places, and where the technology exist to make it in such a realistic manner by a machine, to me it is no different than a piece of driftwood that barely resembles a figure at all. I’m interested in the whole spectrum of figuration, and think that especially the combination of these different forms, expressions and materials are thrilling to me. While there is a technological graveyard
for a lot of things that came in between, I would say that the earliest human artistic expression can still be as valid and meaningful as anything great made today. Art is like a perpetuum mobile that gives endless energy once it’s created, without ever losing any. Forever.

Yves Scherer, Imagine, 2025, Kunstraum Heilig Geist am UNESCO-Welterbe Zollverein, Photo by James Rodemann, Courtesy of the artist