Philosophical Architecture and Presence in Absence

Kunst Werke – KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin introduced a new identity, well not entirely new but a scribbled layer that connects back to its own archive. The space, founded in 1991 by Klaus Biesenbach and contemporaries, has since presented a solid artistic programme of local and international positions. For KW’s extended visual identity, the institution began a conversation with itself – looking at past decades, its archive, and the traces of people, ideas, and artworks that have passed through its spaces. Even without its own art collection, the institution holds residues of relationships, temporality, and art history in the making.

Distilled from letters, annotations, and other collected materials, these scribbles now echoed across mirrors, exhibition leaflets, and way-finders. It offers a moment to reflect on institutional systems, their processes and on how legacies are shaped by people and their politics. Yet it also raises questions: when “process” and the absence of the body are repeatedly invoked, are they examined or instrumentalised? Is it really about making something visible, or pointing to the fact that nothing happens in isolation – that we in the art world still quarrel over legitimisation? There is no escaping the body, the labour. Are we in a post-industrial depression about our own human importance?

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that both exhibitions that opened last Thursday speak of absence of the body, of connections, of relationships – of archives and ideas that live beyond their makers. Kazuko Miyamoto’s intricate installational conversations with walls and floors – largely replicas installed by the KW in-house team – operate as manuals of philosophical architecture. Through archival images and studies on paper that accompany the installations, the temporal becomes anchored in an art practice spanning decades of material and social engagement. String Constructions, the first institutional solo presentation in Germany devoted to Miyamoto (b. 1942), a leading figure in Post-Minimal and feminist movements in New York, focuses on her seminal string constructions from the 1970s and 1980s – the largest collective display to date.

The String Construction series is a simple and refined practice: vertical wall installations, strings connecting floors and walls, grids of nails and threads – soft annotations that speak of contemplative work. The grids appear perfect, yet they resist minimalist accuracy. They respond instead to the artist’s body: her breath, the flow of air, the movement of hands, the shifts between aliveness and stillness.

It is the small glitch that animates the strings. The method is so direct, the reading so literal, but the eye keeps searching for a focal point – like a camera frantically seeking focus – there is nothing to hold on to. And yet it is all about holding on, not with the eyes or an idea of the world, but with a moment of presence. These soft sculptures dance: solid yet translucent, taking up space, breaking movement into increments of pauses and breaths. They refuse handling in their installed objecthood, able to move only when dismantled. A brilliant exercise in refusal – perhaps a perfect description of Miyamoto’s oeuvre, as she continues to build dissident structures and communities, object and human alike.

Completely different in materiality yet aligned in its engagement with community, collective work, and collaboration is the ground-floor exhibition Starmirror. It imagines a scenario in which AI models coordinate humans to generate intelligence for collective benefit. Berlin-based Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst extend their longstanding practice at the intersection of art, music, machine learning, and experimental forms of organisation. Their work often proposes new digital infrastructures, approaching protocols themselves as a medium — structures rehearsing new arrangements between humans and digital languages.

Voices form the material of this installation, a collaboration with Hildegard von Bingen’s work. The German Benedictine abbess, polymath, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary – long gone since 1179 – is reactivated through the choir. The choir becomes a bodily phenomenon, resonance bundled and collated, expanding beyond the individual body and translated into obscurity of the digital.

The first room personifies the non-material through light and sound. One is instantly drawn inward – it is not a space one “stands” in; there is no physical me and the other. Only inside. An eerie sensation of being lured into something one does not quite want to escape. The back room, already theatrically framed as one steps onto the elevated balustrade, surrounds the viewer with speakers on all sides. At its centre, encircled by a labyrinth of benches, a throne-like structure stands as a metaphorical link between earth and heaven. Again, the eerie presence is heightened through light, pulsing between shades of colour.

It is beyond fascinating not just because the exhibition is strong, but because the physical idea of religious presence still works so intensely, even in 2025. Presence itself – so powerful that we forget we once granted it that power: both in the creation of God and AI.