Echoes of Samuel Beckett: “NOT I” Exhibition at Capitain Petzel Berlin and the Fragments of Memory

In the uncanny gap between looking and seeing—where the mind continues to cling to an image even after the light has faded—lies the phenomenon known as “persistence of vision.” At Capitain Petzel, one of Berlin’s iconic art venues on Karl-Marx-Allee, the spring of 2026 welcomes viewers with a shattering group exhibition focused on the dark corridors of the mind and the unstable nature of memory. Titled “NOT I,” the show takes its name from Samuel Beckett’s famous monologue that transforms the theatrical stage into a barren visual field. Beckett’s “Mouth,” suspended in pitch darkness and speaking at relentless speed, forms the conceptual backbone of the exhibition, while the selected artists—from Mike Kelley to Hanne Darboven—examine the fragmentation of the self and the chaotic flow of the act of remembering.

From Beckett’s Monologue to Visual Manifestations

In Samuel Beckett’s Not I, voice is severed from the body; it pours out not from intention but from compulsion, uncontrollably. The exhibition transforms this state of crisis into an act of recognition, opening space for the unruly return of the past. Beckett’s non-linear narrative and non-progressive cyclicality resonate in the gallery space through Mike Kelley’s unsettling works. Kelley’s City Boy – Trauma Image (1984) fuses cartoonish innocence with violent imagery and nightmarish tension, embodying how the return of memory seizes consciousness like a storm.

The Aesthetics of Remembering: Layers, Repetitions, and Remnants

The exhibition brings together artists who offer different aesthetic responses to the unstable structure of memory:

• Systematic Mourning and Repetition: Hanne Darboven’s Hommage an meinen Vater (Homage to My Father) transforms personal loss into a vast notational system. The methodical repetition of grief turns emotion into a definable and visible structure.
• Decomposition of Everyday Objects: Urban Zellweger turns familiar pizza boxes into hazy landscapes erased from memory over time, while Gina Folly presents fragile organic remnants as delicate residues of experience.
• Painted Gesture and Accumulation: William Gaucher layers brushstrokes to form a syntax that carries traces of art-historical memory.

Psychological Disorientation and Ghost Selves

In the later sections of the exhibition, memory takes on physical space and bodily form. Martin Kippenberger’s installation Now I’m going into the birch forest because my pills will soon take effect creates a scene of psychological disorientation with broken birch trunks and scattered pills.

• Monika Sosnowska: With her metal armatures in Ghosts, she produces “ghost” forms that resemble human bodies but remain only as traces of movement.
• Ilaria Vinci: Constructs memory like an onion with concentric shells, emphasizing that the inner labyrinth can only be reached by peeling layer by layer.
• Daria Blum & Xie Lei: Blum’s shattered and reflected self-portrayals and Xie Lei’s spectral figures melting into one another show how the self blurs in the currents of memory.

This selection at Capitain Petzel offers material counterparts to the fragmented inner landscape that Beckett depicted with that solitary, heard-but-unseen voice. At the “Not I” point—where memory stubbornly returns but the self refuses to claim it—art’s healing and shattering power proves itself once again.

Exhibition Information

Venue: Capitain Petzel

Exhibition Title: NOT I

Dates: 9 January – 14 February 2026

Artists: Daria Blum, Hanne Darboven, Gina Folly, William Gaucher, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Monika Sosnowska, Ilaria Vinci, Xie Lei, Urban Zellweger.