Step across the threshold of Esther Schipper amid the relentless scramble of Berlin’s art calendar—most acutely the frantic churn of Berlin Art Week—and the urban cacophony outside is cut dead. With Repose, his second solo exhibition with the gallery, David Claerbout pulls the viewer into a darkened, cinematic time capsule that quietly unsettles the machinery of human perception. Running from 10 September through 24 October 2026, the exhibition mounts a deliberate resistance to the disposable visual culture of rapid consumption, compelling us to stop and genuinely attend to what vanishes in the background.
The works on view examine our fraught, often destructive rapport with the natural world, yet they bypass blunt didacticism. Debuting in Berlin, four new moving-image works glow within the gallery’s darkness like sovereign apertures.
Facing The woodcarver and the forest (2025), one watches a craftsman whittling a spoon from a block of wood with rhythmic precision. What initially registers as an exquisitely meditative, calming gesture turns uncanny the moment the eye drifts beyond the frame: outside the window behind him, with each curling shaving the artisan strips away, the forest quietly, incrementally recedes. The toll of creation hits with the force of a slow-motion catastrophe.
Shortly thereafter, Birdcage (2023) violently ruptures this pastoral composure. As the camera wanders the lush, manicured grounds of a stately residence, a sudden, violent shudder upends the idyllic landscape into a theatre of suspense and dread. One feels viscerally how effortlessly spaces presumed secure can collapse into ruin in a matter of seconds.
Among the exhibition’s most arresting visual achievements, Eagle Eye (2026) positions a bald eagle—that ubiquitous emblem of power and sovereignty—lying conscious yet motionless upon an operating table. Synthesizing CGI and machine-learning tools, the work interrogates not merely the vulnerability of a captive beast, but the blurred frontier separating a sentient creature that observes from an algorithmic system taught how to see. The organic and the synthetic dissolve into a single body, a singular gaze.
In Backwards Growing Tree (2023), which digitally reconfigures an isolated tree in the Italian countryside across a five-year period, Claerbout completely scrambles our temporal bearings. The tree un-grows. Yet this reverse progression unfolds at such an imperceptible crawl that we are forced to confront our own biological blindness to the deep timescales of the natural world.
This duration lies at the very heart of Claerbout’s enterprise: time and continuity. Pushing back against a hyper-accelerated visual economy perpetually hooked on novelty, these video works—stretching across hours or simulating decades—calibrate cinematic duration to the psychically “unproductive” yet tangible rhythm of biological time. Rather than staging an event, they ask us to inhabit countless concurrent processes.
Grounding—and conceptually counterbalancing—the weight of these monumental projections is a selection of works on paper. Far from simple preparatory sketches, these drawings lay bare the cognitive scaffolding behind the moving image; functioning as graphic studies of light, chromatic value, montage, and duration, they act as quiet, essential counterpoints throughout the gallery.
Rather than framing nature through a nostalgic lens, Repose dissects the fragmented, compromised architecture of human perception. Within Esther Schipper’s spaces, this hyperreal universe—where ruin and renewal, menace and visual elegance intertwine—stands as one of the season’s most intellectually stimulating encounters for anyone tracking the porous borders between the organic and the synthetic. For those who have forgotten the true cadence of time and the living world, it is an invitation to sit quietly and take repose before the screen.
