We inhabit an era in which images cascade ceaselessly before our eyes, where the gaze is swiftly exhausted, and desire settles into an endless cadence. The undercurrents of fatigue and discontent pooling beneath the screen’s luminescence form the crux of an exhibition unveiled for Berlin Art Week. Staged at Klemm’s Downstairs and curated by Guilherme Vilhena Martins, tracks, taps brings together works by German artist Mia Gap and Danish artist Freja Sofie Kirk.
On view through 24 October 2026, the exhibition contends that the image is never merely representational, but a pliable substrate—one that can be sculpted, stratified, and obscured.
From Digital Simulation to Physical Object: Mia Gap
Mia Gap approaches the digital quotidian—severed from geographical distance and linear time—as raw material. Translating screen-based compositions into physical objects through painting, photography, and sculptural idioms, the artist tests the fragile threshold dividing reality, mimesis, and simulation.
Harvesting and reconstituting the visual codes of everyday life, Gap transposes the digital epoch’s logic of infinite replication and temporal compression onto the canvas. The resulting dense accretions of material emerge like physical sediment, residues of the digital realm seeping into tactile space.
Desire, Labour, and Hypnotic Framing: Freja Sofie Kirk
Freja Sofie Kirk, by contrast, turns her lens toward the internal apparatus of photography and video, interrogating the uncanny entanglement between media and daily life. Her seven-minute single-channel video installation, Leisure (2026), pulls the viewer into a hypnotic narrative woven from power dynamics, architecture, commodity aesthetics, and the choreography of labour.
Kirk exposes how media permeates social relations and how these ties are, in turn, co-opted and subsumed by the leisure industry. Through the cinematic and sensory force of the moving image, notions of the body, desire, and mortality spill beyond the confines of the two-dimensional frame.
The Point of Contact Between Desire and Rupture
The two artists’ practices converge along divergent yet complementary axes. While Gap anchors digitally conceived worlds into tangible objects, grounding them in physical space, Kirk sets virtuality in motion to unsettle perception itself. tracks, taps demonstrates that the image is far more than a passive surface to be beheld: it is an arena of contestation where seduction, materiality, and simulation collide.
