HAMBURG

Emerging from beneath the surface—both physically, from a residency in a WWII bunker in the Czech Republic, and collectively, through shared experimentation and conversation—the Common Thread Experiment steps into the charged architecture of the Gängeviertel. This new exhibition, where there’s an outside there’s also an inside, marks a shift from introspective dialogues held underground to a public convergence in one of Hamburg’s most symbolically resonant spaces.

Rooted in the anarchist history of the Gängeviertel and the communal ethos of MOM art space, the exhibition treats MOM, the Gängeviertel, and the surrounding city as a layered meta-architecture. Artists living in Hamburg, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, and New York consider the porous boundaries between interior and exterior, public and private, self and system, body and structure within a post-democratic framework.

Dalma Borenich and Petra Polányi’s live “painting-action” spills across the windows dividing MOM from the Gängeviertel courtyard, while Marco Miller lingers in the liminal purgatory between, subtly unraveling spatial perception. Réka Horváth stretches the surface of painting and composition until it becomes structure, as Yixue Zhao, in the exhibition’s innermost room, surrounds herself with consumerist objects in a video installation that turns her image into a digital site of critique, mirroring the capitalist structures surrounding the Gängeviertel from all sides. Vito Baumüller presents a deceptively benign electric chair made from vintage IKEA furniture (only activated by the viewer’s choice to sit), an object laced with deadpan humor that exposes systems of violence, power, and complicity. Atanáz Babinchak uses the bodies of insects as site and projection, blurring containment and the phenomenologies of release through participatory actions which create microcosmic rituals of intimacy and execution. Meanwhile, Hanna Szabó-Sáfrány stages pseudo-experiments that question the permanence of truth, and Sandra Bayer reflects on censorship and bodily autonomy through painting. Collaborating on two investigations into symbolism, Lara-Jo Riva and Diki Luckerson meld their practices within MOM, while Sasha Kulikov disperses his conceptual print work throughout the city as posters and flyers. Finally, Bence Bánhidi-Róza connects the exterior architecture of Hamburg and the Gängeviertel to MOM through a site-specific fabric installation, which mobilizes graffiti and echoes the space’s recent histories of anti-consumerist protest and DIY strategies of visual dissent.

Across the exhibition, themes of stasis, movement, protest, and transformation echo through sociological, mythical, and material registers. This is not a return to the idea of a singular “common thread,” linking these artists and their work to each other, but a refusal of its limits. The threads now are many: intertwined, knotted, kinked—collectively spun into a spool. Where there’s an outside, there’s also an inside, and in the space between, new forms take shape.

Curated by Landon Wilson
In collaboration with Dagmar Rauwald