Watching for exhibitions and happenings outside of the main stage.

The Anatomy of Bureaucracy by Jiří Lindovský, Max van Olffen, Gabriela Genčúrová, Melanie Mork at Berlínskej Model, Prague
Margarita Sanginova Margarita Sanginova

The Anatomy of Bureaucracy by Jiří Lindovský, Max van Olffen, Gabriela Genčúrová, Melanie Mork at Berlínskej Model, Prague

In The Anatomy of Bureaucracy, the corporate space becomes an open framework, absorbing and gradually subordinating everyday experience to the logic of performance. These principles are not limited to the world of work, but extend into what we take home from the working day: the organisation of bodies, abilities, and capacity for attention.

Read More
Spit and Image by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė at Basement Roma
Margarita Sanginova Margarita Sanginova

Spit and Image by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė at Basement Roma

"The artists position their Slavic and Baltic cultural background within a vision of “ancestrality”: Instead of indulging nostalgia, they endeavor to reactivate marginalized non-modern subjectivities through re-choreographed forms. Central to this constellation is the figure of the upiór, a vampire possessing dual souls, an Other lingering between life and death, human and non-human, which carries the whispering of the marginalized and nameless, embracing the fluid identities and multiple possibilities of narratives. In this sense, Spit and Image manifests a complex state of in-betweenness.

In Yield (twinning) (2025), the viewers confront their own sharp reflections in stainless steel flower mirrors. Disturbingly, these nostalgic objects, which are derived from a plastic make-up mirror once-ubiquitous in Eastern Europe, now function as surveillance cameras that rigidly scrutinize viewers who dare to come near - as if the flowers were performing a paradoxical dynamic of gazing and being gazed at, or offering sensorial testimony to the historical rupture between Nature and Culture and Self and Environment" - Yang Beichen.

Read More
Excroissance by Matheline Marmy at Casa Azul, Gordola
Margarita Sanginova Margarita Sanginova

Excroissance by Matheline Marmy at Casa Azul, Gordola

Entering the first room, skeletons of welded steel and copper covered with oxidized textiles are presented. In these works, the process of mineral powders oxidizing on textile is something Marmy likens to a form of painting through and with time: a time that seems to extend beyond human measure, evoking a planetary dimension. - Maddalena Mora

Read More
Half Dry, Half Memory by Julian Siffert, Yixuan Hu, Jan Brauer, Maxine Weiss, Jakob Braito, Ömer Faruk Kaplan, Ilica Fechete, René Stiegler, Markus Sworcik at Trost in Graz, Austria
Teodóra Róka Teodóra Róka

Half Dry, Half Memory by Julian Siffert, Yixuan Hu, Jan Brauer, Maxine Weiss, Jakob Braito, Ömer Faruk Kaplan, Ilica Fechete, René Stiegler, Markus Sworcik at Trost in Graz, Austria

‘Objects, gestures, and spatial encounters did not align into a single form but shifted continually, forming temporary constellations of presence and disappearance. There was an awareness of the times we live in, where symbols of home feel bent or unclear, forms no longer easily recognizable, where something foreign yet strangely familiar begins to take up space.'

Read More
constantly shedding, perpetually becoming by Elisabeth Perrault & Marion Wagschal at Pangée, Montreal
Margarita Sanginova Margarita Sanginova

constantly shedding, perpetually becoming by Elisabeth Perrault & Marion Wagschal at Pangée, Montreal

The body is a subject exhaustively traversed in art history. Idealized, objectified, and stripped of its vulnerabilities, it has often been neutralized and discharged of its complexity. In the work of Marion Wagschal and Elisabeth Perrault, however, the body reclaims its weight and fragility as a vessel of memory and as a site of inheritance where desire, the grotesque, and the sacred coalesce. Their works lean toward one another—Perrault’s tactile assemblages and Wagschal’s painterly tableaux— each confronting intimacy and loss with disarming candor.
- Anaïs Castro

Read More
Weaving Back to Common Groundsby Alexander Klaubert, Francis Kussatz, Julia Lübbecke, Rahel grote Lambers - otc collective - at ACUD Galerie, Berlin
Margarita Sanginova Margarita Sanginova

Weaving Back to Common Groundsby Alexander Klaubert, Francis Kussatz, Julia Lübbecke, Rahel grote Lambers - otc collective - at ACUD Galerie, Berlin

Weaving Back to Common Grounds marks the final stage of the two-year project Have We Passed Peak Collective by otc collective, developed in collaboration with Künstler:innenhaus Lauenburg and other institutions. The project has explored questions of collective practice, shared agency, and collaboration in times of social and cultural change, reflecting on the dynamics between individual and collective work and the conditions that make collaboration possible or strenuous.

- otc collective

Read More
Don't Take It Too Seriously by Philipp Timischl, Agnes Scherer, Robertas Narkus, Johanna Ulfsak, Anna Solal, Joshua Citarella at Temnikova & Kasela, Tallin
Margarita Sanginova Margarita Sanginova

Don't Take It Too Seriously by Philipp Timischl, Agnes Scherer, Robertas Narkus, Johanna Ulfsak, Anna Solal, Joshua Citarella at Temnikova & Kasela, Tallin

"In his 1990 book E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, David Foster Wallace noted that popular culture (primarily television, of course) had begun to shun seriousness. Instead, it was more willing to flirt with the absurd, repetition, self-quotation, and other postmodernist devices. Wallace provided examples: a sitcom in which the characters are aware they are in a sitcom; a commercial where a satisfied customer admits he is merely an actor paid to appear in the film. He argued that in a self-ironic culture, any display of sincerity and humanity can either be ridiculed or viewed with cynicism. Wallace feared that post-irony was gradually erasing the boundaries between humanism and cruelty, humanity and indifference, values and cruel jokes. Did he anticipate that in the quarter-century since, post-irony would become nearly the only way to cope with our surrounding reality?"
Alexander Burenkov

Read More
Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss by Tsvetomira Borisova at Punta, Sofia
Teodóra Róka Teodóra Róka

Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss by Tsvetomira Borisova at Punta, Sofia

Тsvetomira builds the inner world of the (stereotypical idea of) successful woman in stages, bringing together her attributes - necklace, intertwined knives, leash. Composed of archaic totems of violence, but glittering, the essence of her universe is reduced to decor.

Read More
Wired by Adam Takács, Anna Hulačová, Botond Keresztesi, Harrison Pearce, Justin Fitzpatrick, Nam June Paik, OMARA Mara Olah, Robotto Ottó Szabó, Roza El Hassan at Longtermhandstand, Budapest
Margarita Sanginova Margarita Sanginova

Wired by Adam Takács, Anna Hulačová, Botond Keresztesi, Harrison Pearce, Justin Fitzpatrick, Nam June Paik, OMARA Mara Olah, Robotto Ottó Szabó, Roza El Hassan at Longtermhandstand, Budapest

""Nerve cells that fire together wire together.” As neuroscientist Joe Dispenza suggests, what we learn and repeat becomes physically embedded in our neural architecture. Thought becomes structure and experience becomes circuitry" - Peter Bencze

Read More
Are You a Modern Girl? Rituals & Nowness by Juno Calypso, Otucha Collective, Veronika Desova, Sofia Dimova and Gery Georgieva at Punta, Sofia
Teodóra Róka Teodóra Róka

Are You a Modern Girl? Rituals & Nowness by Juno Calypso, Otucha Collective, Veronika Desova, Sofia Dimova and Gery Georgieva at Punta, Sofia

“Are You a Modern Girl!” explores the way rituals are contained and refracted in the present, problematizing their necessity, the effect of commodifying them, and the possibility of them becoming something dangerous if not handled with care. Through photography, video, sculpture and performance, the project presents different perspectives on the extinction, transformation and sustainability of rituals in contemporary society. The starting point for its understanding is the relationship between the new models of communication, forms of work and the economic structures we live in, as institutes of anxiety and alienation, and rituals as a potential means of the aforementioned “making oneself at home in the world”.

Read More
UNREQUINTED REMNANTS by Patricia Avres at Tank, Shanghai
Teodóra Róka Teodóra Róka

UNREQUINTED REMNANTS by Patricia Avres at Tank, Shanghai

Unrequited Remnants delves into the conventions and restrictions that define our contemporary society. The sculptural assemblages featured in the exhibition function as “matter out of place,” a concept Mary Douglas investigates in reference to dirt in her seminal work Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.

Read More
The Next Generation 6 – Energies at Chateau de Servières, Marseille
Teodóra Róka Teodóra Róka

The Next Generation 6 – Energies at Chateau de Servières, Marseille

Parallèle is more than a festival. It's a comprehensive project supporting emerging international artists, actively involved in the production, distribution, and support of projects; artistic programming; training and professional integration; experiencing art with everyone; and reflecting on contemporary issues.

Read More
Weathered Together by Maija Fox & Bianca Hlywa at Kohta Kunsthalle, Helsinki
Margarita Sanginova Margarita Sanginova

Weathered Together by Maija Fox & Bianca Hlywa at Kohta Kunsthalle, Helsinki

"They both work at an impossible scale and have become intimately familiar with industrial-grade production processes. There is something primeval, almost mythical, about Maija’s way of working: the small individual taking on colossal powers. And in Bianca’s work the level of difficulty – to produce, transport, store and install these huge, living, decomposing, flesh-like curtains – means that all aspects of her practice are working against her. This is then juxtaposed with the determination and relentlessness that comes through in everything she does." - Benjamin Orlow

Read More
Made in Europe by Zauri Matikashvili at at bsmnt, Leipzig
Margarita Sanginova Margarita Sanginova

Made in Europe by Zauri Matikashvili at at bsmnt, Leipzig

Through the eponymous video as well as installations, the exhibition Made in Europe interrogates questions of belonging, economic constraints, and intergenerational conflict. For more than thirty years, the artist’s father traveled to Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, primarily to purchase Mercedes Sprinter vans and loading them with bicycles, leather sofas, or chairs at a low cost, which he then sold at a profit in Georgia, 4,800 kilometers away. The video work Made in Europe documents this strenuous journey and the process of commodifying of the items that Zauri Matikashvili’s father had transported to the Caucasus by container.

Read More

Disclaimer

Countercynic does not claim ownership of the images published in articles on our website. We have made efforts to identify and credit the rightful copyright holders. If you believe that we have used an image to which you hold the rights without permission, please contact us at countercynic@gmail.com.