The day was bright and slightly too warm as we emerged from the underground onto the spacious concrete paved Breitschiedplatz in West Berlin. I wasn’t feeling very human, aka alive; but with a little help of a way-too-big glass of iced latte and half a piece of a way-too-big Sicilian cannolo, my companion A. and I had made our way to Eric Baudelaire’s exhibition at CCA Berlin. I wasn’t sure how much I could take in since I, the writer of this text, spent the last 3 days prior to her visit to this exhibition in an almost cliché-d Berliner style: with a proper bender, or, as I like to say to people, I have been spending a few days in Bendergasse*. Some may ask, why spend 127 words on something entirely unrelated to the exhibition itself? Well, I could say that: A.) the writer is trying to capture the spirit and experience of that summer’s day or B.) I literally don’t know how to begin this review of an exhibition that touches me in a way that I don’t really understand without sounding trite.

After all, no one is paying me to write this, and I can write whatever I want. (Although I would like to and hope to make right by the work and make right by my own opinion.)

Going in without knowing anything about CCA Berlin’s space, I was struck by a short phrase under the information about the opening time, “OPEN FOR ALL”: a rather welcoming gesture, I thought, and a slightly musty smell inside the double-layered glass and concrete structure. The interior space is neatly divided, with a corridor surrounding several wood-panelled rooms, framed on one side by clear glass panes on a black steel grid. My immediate association of the space is with mid-century offices, sleek and age-defyingly stylish; albeit upon inspection, the finishing of the steel was peeling in spots, and the honey coloured wood panels were showing signs of wear and tear. After the visit, I learned that the space now housing the institution used to be the foyer of the Kaiser Wilhelms Gedachtnis Kirche, designed by Egon Eiermann in the late 50s, after the original Neo-Romanesque über-Preußischer church dedicated to the first Hohenzollern Kaiser was bombed out in the Second World War. A little sweeping preamble, and a context for the work we are about to experience; a descriptive paragraph and a sentence or two about the background and history: check, check, now on to the works:

In each room, a wooden sculpture stood, in rows, side by side, or singularly in some smaller rooms. From afar, they formed a strange topography; a miniature landscape growing from a wooden plank atop steel legs, a bunch of table tops gone haywire. Various bulbous and jagged shapes betrayed the solid nature of the material; I wondered if it was CNC-ed rather than carved by hand. The colour of the wood reflected and mimicked the fading wall panel. The uniformity of surfaces made it hard to see what was being depicted: some noticeable shapes such as leaves, dice, and what seemed to be a string of beads. There were a bunch of Braille characters on the side of each steel table. I wasn’t sure if it was a word, a phrase, or a whole sentence since I don’t know Braille, but that serves as a crucial clue. Later, after consulting the exhibition text, it was stated that one may touch the sculptures.

I untangled both of my arms from the “carefully-looking-at-art” posture and started sweeping my right hand over the sensuous surface, just to feel nothing. In short —I was totally disoriented. Sure, these sculptures are extremely well-executed and visually appealing, but I can’t shake the sense that these sculptures with amusing names (My favourite of the bunch being “5 X Amy Winehouse”) have nothing to do with me, as in, I simply don’t have the ability to decipher them. I was informed by the wall text that they were the result of a collaborative effort between the artist and a group of student from the National Institute for Visually Impaired Youths. Simultaneously, a muffled sound of people conversing in French echoed throughout the space; I headed down to the basement level into an auditorium where the 5-screen video installation stood. We slumped ourselves down on the sofa in the centre and let the images washed over us. 

What was depicted in Quand le Soir Tombe (When Night Falls) is rather difficult to summarise, if not to describe in length what was going on on the 5 screens. (In order not to regurgitate the well-written exhibition text/synopsis by the assistant curator, Nan Xi, here is the link to the text on CCA’s website) The video consists of 7 vignettes from different settings and social scenarios, most of them set in France; workers picking and transporting roses, a stock-trading class for the less fortunate youths, lab workers testing various objects to establish safety standard, the UNESCO general assembly in Paris, Art conservators working in a sculpture storage, a voting station for the Le Pen vs. Macron presidential election, and the National Institute for Visually Impaired Youths.

The five screens were seldom on at the same time. They acted, in a way that is, at first glance, quite erratic; They flickered on and off at their own pace. One of them magnified the other, a zoom-in on the same shot. Some acted as a backdrop to the action on another screen, or offered the same action from another perspective. This play of multiple perspectives dissolves the linearity of our perception. At one moment, I could feel the strain on my eyes, rolling from left to right and back ad infinitum, trying to absorb every screen at the same time to no avail. The work is a feature-length video installation, not an easy work to sit through in these days and age where many people, including me, turn to doomscrolling as a numbing agent in an escapist's torpor, but perhaps the artist had learned a trick or two from the daily bombardment of moving images in our lives, shuffling them around to keep us alert. Some of them were quite mesmerising, as if we were the fly on the wall, seeing events unfolding and the inner workings of the aforementioned places, but at times the camera lingers for an extended time; one can’t help but wonder about the thread that links the events together, or the internal logic of these disparate images.

With that question aside, in all of the vignettes, the most emotionally charged part and perhaps most potentially problematic is when the camera roams in the National Institute for Visually Impaired Youths. Applying a cool, impassive eye on other subjects might garnered some curious chuckles: A UNESCO delegate falling asleep in the assembly, a joke between colleagues at the voting station, condoms being blown up to the point of explosion like balloons, or a lab worker applying pressure to test the durability of some impossibly cuddly stuffed animals at the Institute of Metrology, but at the institute, upon the children; it is rather hard to remain a passive spectator. When parts of myself flinch and recoil with pity for the children, the impassive gaze of the camera never stops. There seems to be a special interest in the children, almost establishing scenes with some of them as characters; I smiled as two young ones, on the verge of their teenage years, playfully banter with one another. They were funny, full of sunny vivacity as children mostly do, but I can’t help feeling rather ambivalent in seeing them on the screen.

One of the most striking scenes in the whole film is a very short exchange within a group of girls; one of them announced that a crew is making a film inside the school, and another cried out that she is scared of them because she couldn’t see them. The reason for this pronouncement is simple, yet it reveals the inner logic of the distrustful sentiment in her voice. When the faculty of sight is deprived, an atmosphere of trust and goodwill must be established; a sense of community must be built in this world that 99% of the infrastructure wasn’t made to accommodate them. One’s existence by collaboration is being highlighted. This thought brought me back to the sculptures and sound installation upstairs; I believe I had used the word “strange” in my description of the sculptures above. The quality of strangeness only depends on who is perceiving them; for people with visual impairment, this is how they perceive the world in absolute normalcy, through touch and sound. What we take for granted, for them, must be learned, and perhaps for us "normal" people, vice versa?

After the installation had looped to the point where we first arrived, we went back up again to the sculptures. I noticed a protruding area with multiple ridges that seemed familiar and placed my left hand upon it; each joint of my knuckles fitted each ridge not quite perfectly, but enough for me to feel the smooth surface close to my bare skin. Not quite perfectly, but it is always worth trying, isn’t it?

When Night falls

Éric Baudelaire

12 June - 29 August 2026

CCA Berlin

*the term came from a name of an actual alley in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Coincidentally, the word bender is also a slang in English meaning engaging in a wild drinking spree.