THE CURATORIAL TEXT
Reality bends. It shifts, distorts, and fragments—never fixed, always in flux. We live among flickers where perception collides with imagination, and the banal can be made strange. Unrealish brings together three artists who work at the edge of this collision. Through acts of distortion, doubling, and reconfiguration, they create visual worlds that feel at once familiar and unstable. This exhibition is not about escaping reality; it is an engagement with how reality is constructed and reconfigured in our imaginations. What we see, what we remember, and what we reinvent are all different. The surreal also lingers here as a method that helps us unfasten what feels fixed through imagination. If early Surrealism sought to give form to dream states and unconscious desires, the works in Unrealish operate in a more conscious realm, intentionally intervening with the visible and playing with the set rules of memory and perception.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of “unreality” provides us with a philosophical scaffolding of this terrain. In The Imaginary (1940), he describes consciousness as defined by what is present while also recognizing what is absent and possible. Instead of only reflecting the world, imagination then alters our surroundings in an unreal space. For Sartre, imagination is a creative force that introduces potential into being; what we imagine is real yet untouchable. The artworks in Unrealish inhabit this mode of irreality as deliberate constructions of new possibilities by projecting imagination into reality.
These ideas of imagination and unreality find a new resonance in the present moment. Just after the centenary of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto in 2024, a new wave of exhibitions and retrospectives reaffirms Surrealism’s continuing presence in contemporary culture. Far from a historical closure, this centennial underscored how artists today return to the movement’s legacy to reconsider its methods of disruption and play. Additionally, the renewed attention to overlooked surrealist artists, among them Leonora Carrington, Toyen, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, and far too many others to name, has reoriented the conversation towards Surrealism’s unfinished project of dismantling systems of perception itself. In this light, Unrealish becomes an echo of the broader movement, exploring how surrealism’s techniques of estrangement still persist in contemporary practice.
Set against the backdrop of Berlin, a city already defined by transformation, reinvention, and new possibilities, Unrealish reflects its surroundings. Taking place in a building marked for eventual demolition, the exhibition mirrors the shifting realities that it explores. Meanwhile, Berlin’s reputation as an artistic haven faces its own precarity as recent budget cuts threaten the cultural sectors. These layers of impermanence remind us of the urgency of creativity in a world where even the foundations can feel unstable. However, Unrealish does not mourn uncertainty and instability; it embraces it with all of the creative possibilities that reality-in-flux can bring.
Marta Djourina works with light as both medium and subject. In her works from the series The Dematerialization of the Everyday, she creates camera-less photographs developed in the darkroom, made by filtering light through everyday objects. Materials such as plastic wrap, mesh, and foil are altered or melted by the heat of the exposure process, leaving just a trace behind. What emerges is neither pure abstraction nor faithful documentation but something in between: color fields, textures, and structures that retain a sense of the original material’s form, even as they become something else entirely. The object is then activated and visually reconfigured. This process-based approach is echoed in her large-scale installations. As light becomes architectural, the viewer’s body is also implicated. Gesture expands outward as pigment flows along the paper, and her works become environments where acts of seeing are made spatial. Djourina’s practice then centers here on perception in motion. It is less about seeing than how seeing unfolds over time. Each work holds a record of contact between light and surface, intention and chance.
Toni Mauersberg’s Pas de Deux series unfolds as a series of double takes, as diptychs that place art historical fragments against contemporary aesthetic reconfigurations. These visual pairings are less about homage than about choreography. The works face one another, not in agreement, but in tension. Mauersberg isolates historical references, be they figures, gestures, or palettes, and stages them anew. In her reconfiguring, the past becomes uncanny as her diptychs operate like visual palimpsests, where one image overlays and disrupts the other. While they take art historical references, they are not replications but reframings of the past. Rather than restoring continuity, Mauersberg emphasizes the gaps. The space between the diptychs becomes a space for interpretation. Here, by reinterpreting and reframing the past, Mauersberg invites viewers to confront how visual memory is constructed and how it can be unsettled.
Cora Wöllenstein’s practice, which spans painting, embroidery, and sculpture, is quietly uncanny. It lingers on themes of time, healing, and the weight of memory. Her protagonists emerge not from dreams but from a subtle surrealism rooted in material practice. Domestic fabrics, embroidery threads, and fragments of costumes serve as a base for her tragicomic protagonists. In Rebirth (2023), a life-sized figure embroidered in red recalls Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, but the reference is abstracted, refracted through gesture and repetition as the figure holds itself. Her ongoing cycle, Earth’s Widening Girth (and Other Bereavements) (2024–25), brings sculptures, textiles, and paintings into loose arrangements that feel more like stage than scene. The title references the literal expansion of the planet as the poles melt and Earth’s rotation slows, a shift that echoes the exhaustion and elasticity explored in her work. As her figures stretch, heal, and continue on, the surreal becomes less a dream state than a condition, always embedded in gesture and the tension of reflection.
Together, the artists in Unrealish explore the constructed nature of reality. Their works are speculative in the way that they invite viewers to consider how images form, mutate, and return. Sartre’s unreality becomes a useful guide here. It is not a negation of what is or has been but a potential fed by imagination. These are works that stretch perception to explore what more might be possible. If the surreal once turned to dreams in order to access the unconscious, this exhibition turns to material processes, fractured histories, and embodied perception. There is no singular vision or narrative, only resonances, echoes, and overlays. The title itself is also intentionally unstable: Unrealish implies an approximation and a state of flux, floating between the tactile environment we inhabit and the memories and possibilities of what might be. While certainty feels increasingly out of reach, Unrealish leans forward; it embraces and affirms imagination and creative distortion as tools for engaging with the world around us, not as it is, but as it might become.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of “unreality” provides us with a philosophical scaffolding of this terrain. In The Imaginary (1940), he describes consciousness as defined by what is present while also recognizing what is absent and possible. Instead of only reflecting the world, imagination then alters our surroundings in an unreal space. For Sartre, imagination is a creative force that introduces potential into being; what we imagine is real yet untouchable. The artworks in Unrealish inhabit this mode of irreality as deliberate constructions of new possibilities by projecting imagination into reality.
These ideas of imagination and unreality find a new resonance in the present moment. Just after the centenary of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto in 2024, a new wave of exhibitions and retrospectives reaffirms Surrealism’s continuing presence in contemporary culture. Far from a historical closure, this centennial underscored how artists today return to the movement’s legacy to reconsider its methods of disruption and play. Additionally, the renewed attention to overlooked surrealist artists, among them Leonora Carrington, Toyen, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, and far too many others to name, has reoriented the conversation towards Surrealism’s unfinished project of dismantling systems of perception itself. In this light, Unrealish becomes an echo of the broader movement, exploring how surrealism’s techniques of estrangement still persist in contemporary practice.
Set against the backdrop of Berlin, a city already defined by transformation, reinvention, and new possibilities, Unrealish reflects its surroundings. Taking place in a building marked for eventual demolition, the exhibition mirrors the shifting realities that it explores. Meanwhile, Berlin’s reputation as an artistic haven faces its own precarity as recent budget cuts threaten the cultural sectors. These layers of impermanence remind us of the urgency of creativity in a world where even the foundations can feel unstable. However, Unrealish does not mourn uncertainty and instability; it embraces it with all of the creative possibilities that reality-in-flux can bring.
Marta Djourina works with light as both medium and subject. In her works from the series The Dematerialization of the Everyday, she creates camera-less photographs developed in the darkroom, made by filtering light through everyday objects. Materials such as plastic wrap, mesh, and foil are altered or melted by the heat of the exposure process, leaving just a trace behind. What emerges is neither pure abstraction nor faithful documentation but something in between: color fields, textures, and structures that retain a sense of the original material’s form, even as they become something else entirely. The object is then activated and visually reconfigured. This process-based approach is echoed in her large-scale installations. As light becomes architectural, the viewer’s body is also implicated. Gesture expands outward as pigment flows along the paper, and her works become environments where acts of seeing are made spatial. Djourina’s practice then centers here on perception in motion. It is less about seeing than how seeing unfolds over time. Each work holds a record of contact between light and surface, intention and chance.
Toni Mauersberg’s Pas de Deux series unfolds as a series of double takes, as diptychs that place art historical fragments against contemporary aesthetic reconfigurations. These visual pairings are less about homage than about choreography. The works face one another, not in agreement, but in tension. Mauersberg isolates historical references, be they figures, gestures, or palettes, and stages them anew. In her reconfiguring, the past becomes uncanny as her diptychs operate like visual palimpsests, where one image overlays and disrupts the other. While they take art historical references, they are not replications but reframings of the past. Rather than restoring continuity, Mauersberg emphasizes the gaps. The space between the diptychs becomes a space for interpretation. Here, by reinterpreting and reframing the past, Mauersberg invites viewers to confront how visual memory is constructed and how it can be unsettled.
Cora Wöllenstein’s practice, which spans painting, embroidery, and sculpture, is quietly uncanny. It lingers on themes of time, healing, and the weight of memory. Her protagonists emerge not from dreams but from a subtle surrealism rooted in material practice. Domestic fabrics, embroidery threads, and fragments of costumes serve as a base for her tragicomic protagonists. In Rebirth (2023), a life-sized figure embroidered in red recalls Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, but the reference is abstracted, refracted through gesture and repetition as the figure holds itself. Her ongoing cycle, Earth’s Widening Girth (and Other Bereavements) (2024–25), brings sculptures, textiles, and paintings into loose arrangements that feel more like stage than scene. The title references the literal expansion of the planet as the poles melt and Earth’s rotation slows, a shift that echoes the exhaustion and elasticity explored in her work. As her figures stretch, heal, and continue on, the surreal becomes less a dream state than a condition, always embedded in gesture and the tension of reflection.
Together, the artists in Unrealish explore the constructed nature of reality. Their works are speculative in the way that they invite viewers to consider how images form, mutate, and return. Sartre’s unreality becomes a useful guide here. It is not a negation of what is or has been but a potential fed by imagination. These are works that stretch perception to explore what more might be possible. If the surreal once turned to dreams in order to access the unconscious, this exhibition turns to material processes, fractured histories, and embodied perception. There is no singular vision or narrative, only resonances, echoes, and overlays. The title itself is also intentionally unstable: Unrealish implies an approximation and a state of flux, floating between the tactile environment we inhabit and the memories and possibilities of what might be. While certainty feels increasingly out of reach, Unrealish leans forward; it embraces and affirms imagination and creative distortion as tools for engaging with the world around us, not as it is, but as it might become.