The two-part exhibition project Concrete & Feathers | Soft Archives explores how artistic processes generate resonance and develop resilience in an increasingly harsh and crisis-ridden world – and how we can experience spaces, matter and life as both fragile and resilient. The exhibition transforms the raw aesthetics of the site, based on the atmosphere of concrete and brutalism and the clear geometries of the space, into a stage for the fragility of human experience, physicality and emotions. Concrete and its heavy weight, a symbol of permanence, urbanity and industry, enter into a dialogical contrast with tender, flowing, fragile materials that incorporate lightness, transience and physical and organic presence. The harshness of the architecture gives rise to a strength of the soft, immaterial, flowing and constantly changing.
In the windowless, spacious underground car parks of the Kunstraum Potsdamer Strasse, a liminal space is created, a kind of storage for memories that seems to suspend time and the present. In Concrete & Feathers, the students present site-specific, experimental works – spatial and sound installations, sculptural objects and ephemeral gestures. They create a resonating body – a kind of fragile network of relations in which the perception of physicality, materiality, tactility, immateriality, transitions, collectivity, a sense of security and digital presence merge in a multisensorial way. Moving through the space, one experiences how heaviness can carry fragility, how hard surfaces can absorb traces of softness, how stability and lightness can exist simultaneously, and how fragile bodies and forms are able to develop unexpected resilience.
The works by Soft Archives in the gallery on the ground floor deal with the motif of memory as an immaterial and ephemeral phenomenon. In the form of photographs, film fragments and objects, the students develop archives that give memory a materiality and physicality while remaining “soft” and open, leaving room for ephemeral, constantly changing processes.
The exhibition is intended as an immersive experience, a landscape of the in between, that emphasises pausing, conscious movement and one's own feelings – and makes the power of fragility and softness tangible as a resistant resonance of spaces and bodies.
The exhibition project Concrete and Feathers and Soft Archives at Kunstraum Potsdamer Straße is being developed and realised in collaboration with students from the Berlin University of the Arts (Class of Spatial Design and Exhibition Design, Prof. Gabi Schillig, KM Enzo Zak Lux) as well as students from various universities and studierendenWERK BERLIN (Claudia Brieske, Isa Zappe). It positions itself as a central location for the student art scene in Berlin during Gallery Weekend 2026.
