Artists

Ersan Mondtag

Press release

DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM is pleased to present Dispair, Ersan Mondtag’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The show opens on occasion of Berlin Art Week on Wednesday, September 9, and is on view until October 31, 2026. The opening will be celebrated with a reception as part of Gallery Night on Thursday, September 10, 6–10 PM. Ersan Mondtag works at the intersection of visual art, theater, opera, and film. His practice fuses sculpture, installation and performance art, and space in a unified visual language. At its center stands the body as a vessel of recollection. Life events become imprinted upon materials as well as on gestures, postures, and architectural spaces. Navigating between personal history and collective memory, Mondtag’s works examine how social relations take solid form in bodies, objects, and landscapes. Dispair presents a new ensemble of works that Mondtag has created specifically for the exhibition at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM. It combines large-scale sculptures made of carbonized wood and a series of wood-and-silicone reliefs. The works add to the artist’s ongoing exploration of questions around transience, desire, and collective memory. They grow out of extended meditations on the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion—with a focus both on forms of solidarity and on the fragility of communities and their shifting internal as well as external boundaries. The wood of the sculptures serves as a central material and symbolic anchor. An organic material, wood here also figures as a medium of history. In carbonized form, it evokes cycles of growth, destruction, and preservation. The act of burning both transforms and immortalizes the material—a process that reveals recollection to be not a static archive but something tangible and engrained in the body. Destruction and preservation are thus tied together by an irresolvable tension. The silicone expands this materiality to include a corporeal, indeed almost epidermal, quality. Materiality and scenography constitute the core of Mondtag’s creative practice. Sculptural elements, sound, and performative gestures serve as vehicles for history and collective memory. His works coalesce into atmospheric visual spaces in which physical material becomes a repository of time, loss, and transformation. Historical, political, and personal dimensions overlap, engendering spaces of experience that defy reduction to unambiguous narratives. Dispair opens up a space for inquiries into the political and social conditions of the present as well as possible visions for the future. The works revolve around the fragility of democratic and civic structures and the mechanisms that perpetuate fear, exclusion, and violence. Weaving together personal experience and collective memory, Mondtag creates a visual universe in which past, present, and future appear inextricably intertwined. Neoliberalism with its cannibalistic exploitation of care, infrastructure, and natural resources as well as art, culture, and political and social utopias has instilled a sense in people that time is no longer moving forward. Today’s culture often merely recycles old forms instead of engendering radical innovations or visions of the future. The twenty-first century seems like an echo chamber in which authoritarian and fascist ideas from the twentieth century are making a comeback—and not only they: the ghosts of social-democratic notions of prosperity, of anti-racism, decolonization, and feminist or queer liberation similarly haunt the present, making us feel what is truly missing today. The above is an excerpt from an essay on the exhibition by Oliver Koerner von Gustorf that will be published on our website prior to the opening. Concurrently with Dispair, Mondtag presents Alternde Meister, a performance developed in collaboration with Nadim Samman and produced in partnership with the Berliner Ensemble. As the Berlin Art Week’s opening event, the work marks the start of the program and unfolds over the course of several stagings in the rooms of the Gemäldegalerie. Conceived as a Berlin vanitas, Alternde Meister initiates a dialogue between aging bodies and paintings from past centuries. Bridging the divide between museum and theater, a living tableau of beauty, transience, and memory emerges in which past and present briefly share the same moment in time. The performance premieres on Friday, September 11, 7–10 PM. Additional stagings are held on Saturday and Sunday, September 12 and 13, from 10:30 AM to 5:30 PM, at the Gemäldegalerie, Johanna und Eduard Arnhold Platz, 10785 Berlin. Ersan Mondtag gained international recognition with his contribution in the German pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia 2024. In Monument of an Unknown Man, he created an immersive space of recollection in which installation art, film, and performance scrutinized the history of labor migration through the prism of his own family’s story. The work also marked the inception of his current creative engagement with material, memory, and the body as a historical archive. Mondtag is currently directing Ariadne auf Naxos at the Salzburg Festival. In 2027, Mondtag will open the Bayreuth Festival with a new production of Parsifal.