A Choreography Where Shadows Speak: Ligia Lewis’s I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR… at Gropius Bau

November 26, 20254 min read

From 16 October 2025 to 18 January 2026, Berlin’s Gropius Bau hosts one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary performance: Ligia Lewis.

The exhibition I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR… brings together the artist’s multilayered practice and asks how body, history, and memory are inscribed onto one another. Lewis’s voice, her body, and her relationship with space wander through the building alongside ghosts that spill from the past into the present.

A Story Seeping Through the Cracks of History – A Plot, A Scandal (2023)

The exhibition opens with Lewis’s 2023 video work A Plot, A Scandal.

Set in a pastoral Caribbean landscape, Lewis and Corey Scott-Gilbert appear in baroque wigs and lilac tones. Behind the playful gestures, quotations from slavery-era laws can be heard.

References range from John Locke’s theories of property to resistance figures such as Maria Olofa (Wolofa) and José Aponte, weaving a web of history full of ruptures rather than a linear narrative. For Lewis, the “ghost” emerges precisely here: stories that cannot be told, that have been erased, yet still circulate.

Darkness, Sound, and the Embodiment of Absence – Water Will (in Melody) (2018/2025)

The next room is plunged almost entirely into darkness.

The installation stems from the stage piece Water Will (in Melody). Fragments from the Brothers Grimm tale “The Willful Child” drift through a polyphonic texture that moves from whispers to screams.

Here Lewis withdraws the body to investigate “presence within darkness.”

One of the exhibition’s most intense experiences is this aesthetic of subtraction: the unseen body hands itself over to sound, and the space becomes not an absence but a new form of being.

An Ongoing Experiment: steady now study (2023)

Throughout the run, the three-hour performance steady now study (most days) forms the living spine of the exhibition.

Three dancers in tracksuits move through falling, crawling, convulsing, and rising again—a choreography that proceeds like an open workbook.

The distance between body and viewer sometimes collapses: performers slip among the audience, squeeze onto benches, and redraw the boundaries of the space.

Lewis describes the piece as “an unending study”—a choreography that begins anew each day and finds a different rhythm every time.

Final Stop: The Echo of Death on Stage – deader than dead (2020)

The exhibition closes with deader than dead.

Lewis and three performers explore the thin line between “dying” and “breaking character” through repeated collapses. Deadpan humour, theatrical poses, moments of rupture—all are fixed within the video.

The work reminds us how the gap between performance and documentation is stretched: what does the live become once it is captured?

The Exhibition as a Whole: A Body–History–Space Triangle

Ligia Lewis’s show at Gropius Bau keeps returning, in different forms, to a single question:

How does a history live inside a body? And how do erased stories—ghost-like—return with what traces?

All of the artist’s works carry a political gesture that oscillates between visibility and absence. Lewis positions her performance practice as “a writing against racial erasure,” and that writing sometimes becomes sound, sometimes body, sometimes silent darkness.