Stepping off Berlin’s characteristically brisk, restless streets and into Hua International, my mind drifted almost immediately to Samuel Beckett’s radio play Embers. In it, Henry talks incessantly to drown out the roar of the sea surging in his skull, while his companion Ada listens quietly, murmuring: “Like an old sound I used to hear. It’s like another time, in the same place…” It is precisely within this liminal interval—at the waterline where temporal duration dissolves into brine and leaks into the present—that this exhibition unfolds.
Encountering Like Another Time, in the Same Place (which ran through 17 October 2026), one found oneself following a constellation of distress flares launched across history, charted through the works of Zhang Peili, Alfredo Jaar, and David Horvitz.
A Monumental Indifference Amid the Swell: Zhang Peili
Upon entering the main gallery, an overwhelming swell seems to break overhead: one is instantly pulled into the 17.5-minute loop of Zhang Peili’s colossal three-channel video installation At Sea (2024). Across the screens stretches an infinite, vividly saturated, engulfing ocean. Drifting atop the water are the floating remnants of a sunken vessel—orange lifebuoys, a sodden teddy bear, scattered luggage—and, in the thick of this maritime disaster, a lone figure who seems lifted straight from monochrome archival footage. Yet the man exhibits not a tremor of panic. He casually draws out a smartphone, takes a slow sip of his drink, and reclines against the drift, gazing impassively toward the horizon to the strains of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Witnessing the sublime, vertical solitude of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea mutate into the tragicomic numbness of the modern subject—scrolling serenely through catastrophe—is nothing short of chilling.
Nearby, the gaze shifts to 10 x 10 (2020), an installation of one hundred miniature LED panels dispersed across the floor, and the series One-Thousandth of a Second to One Second (1995), undulating gently under the artificial current of an electric fan. Confronting these passport portraits of missing children, one is caught in a tense oscillation between the floating figure’s detached apathy and the agonizing terrestrial weight of scouring the world for a vanished face.
A Crimson Tenacity Piercing the Dark: Alfredo Jaar
Venturing into a dimmer, more hushed recess of the gallery, one is stopped short by a fiery neon glow cleaving the dark like an incisive cut: I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On. Here, Alfredo Jaar has seared the climactic closing paradox of Beckett’s The Unnamable directly into the architectural core. At the exact juncture where pause and progress seem equally untenable, the work confronts the viewer with life’s stubborn, visceral refusal to yield.
Hung nearby is Jaar’s monumental photograph One Million Points of Light (2006), which at first glance suggests nothing more than an innocent, shimmering dance of sun across gentle ripples. Yet looking out across this Atlantic expanse stretching between Angola and Brazil, the realization that this is no pastoral seascape—that these uncanny waters bear the unfathomable historical gravity of the Middle Passage, holding collective trauma suspended in their depths—delivers a quiet, gut-wrenching blow.
Setting One’s Watch to the Sky: David Horvitz
The exhibition takes its most playful, yet undeniably poetic turn in the hands of David Horvitz. For one, standard timekeeping proves useless here: the gallery departs entirely from municipal opening hours. Regulated by Horvitz’s bronze bell piece Nautical Dusk (VII) (2017), the space closes each evening precisely at nautical twilight, the astronomical moment when the sun dips twelve degrees below the horizon. Shifting by a matter of minutes each day with the Earth’s axial rotation, the ritual turns each visit into a race calibrated to planetary motion rather than the clock.
Wandering further, one encounters the grainy archival video Horvitz famously uploaded to YouTube years ago, purporting it to be lost footage of Bas Jan Ader, the conceptual artist who set sail across the Atlantic in 1975 never to return. It is an exquisite mnemic parlor trick, blurring the boundaries between historical record and persistent rumor. Yet it was another neon work that prompted the warmest smile—evoking a message traced by a finger onto a fogged bathroom mirror: “Whenever I take a shower, I wonder when this water was a cloud.” Where Jaar responds in an austere, literary red, Horvitz counters in an airy, disarmingly tender blue grounded in the everyday.
Waves in the Veins
Before crossing the threshold back to the street, a final gesture remains: skimming the sheet music of When the Ocean Sounds (Fizzle), rendered in seawater and salt, and pausing at the adjacent station to press a delicate rubber stamp onto the wrist: Your Veins, Ocean Waves.
Stepping out onto the Berlin pavement, the indigo ink on the skin begins its slow retreat, yet the salt of the ocean remains palpable. Beckett’s sweeping dialectic of time and tide has filtered through the crashing currents at Hua International, settling quietly right against the pulse.
