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David Claerbout in Berlin: Biological Rhythm of Time and Nature “Repose” at Esther Schipper

David Claerbout in Berlin: Biological Rhythm of Time and Nature “Repose” at Esther Schipper

Belgian artist David Claerbout appears before us in his exhibition titled “Repose,” taking place from September 11 to October 24, 2026, at the Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin, with four video works—on view in Berlin for the first time—alongside accompanying works on paper that question the limits of human perception and gaze.

In Claerbout’s practice, time is not a rapidly consumed construct, but a biological process expanding at its own pace like a living organism. In the video The woodcarver and the forest included in the exhibition, as we watch a craftsman carving wooden blocks to produce spoons with meditative calmness, we notice that the forest outside the window slowly diminishes with every stroke of the gouge. In the work Eagle Eye, a white-tailed eagle lying awake but completely motionless on an operating table subverts the customary symbol of power and dominance; while Backwards Growing Tree, in which a single tree in the Italian countryside is grown in reverse through a five-year digital edit, interferes with nature’s temporal linearity. Meanwhile, Birdcage disrupts the viewer’s comfort zone with a tension that suddenly erupts in the peaceful garden of a grand house.

Spanning hours or even years, these long-duration works align the time of the film with the biological rhythm of the visitor in the gallery. Turning his back on plotlines or rapid action, Claerbout centers peripheral details that the human eye usually glosses over. Serving as color and light studies accompanying the artist’s videos, his drawings mentally deepen the ideas of editing and sequencing from the video montage onto paper.

Standing at the intersection of the artificial and the organic, technology and nature in the dark gallery space, Repose reminds us how we perceive the world simultaneously as incomplete and multi-layered through our two eyes, two ears, and two hemispheres of the brain, rather than fixing our gaze on a single event. Against the ready-made images offered by screens, Claerbout leaves behind a fragile threshold of perception where we constantly renegotiate what we believe and what we see.