In Berlin’s freezing winter atmosphere, the final chapter of a shattering trilogy echoes from the walls of Zilberman on Goethestraße. This week on Apartment No: 26’s Berlin route, there’s Neriman Polat and her “Groundless” exhibition, whispering how social, legal, and existential foundations slip away beneath our feet.
Running until February 7, 2026, this exhibition is the grand yet equally melancholic finale of Polat’s trilogy of shows—begun in 2018 and centered on societal “deprivations.”
Since 2018, Neriman Polat has been documenting the gradual loss of protection, structure, and stability using the smallest building block of language: the “-less” suffix. In Polat’s hands, this suffix transcends being a mere grammatical element and becomes an inventory of the rights and feelings modern humans are deprived of.
A summary of the stops in Polat’s seven-year conceptual journey:
2018 – Merciless: the absence of mercy and compassion; societal harshness.
2023 – Roofless: the loss of the right to shelter, safe spaces, and belonging.
The trilogy’s final chapter, Groundless, delves deeply not only into physical rootlessness but also into the shaking foundations of democracy, justice, and ecological balance. Polat concretizes in visual language how freedom is endangered and how the “social contracts” holding society together are beginning to crack.
Amid global ecological and economic crises, the exhibition harbors the effort to find new ground and re-root oneself among collapsing structures. This parallelism between the loss of physical stability and existential upheaval is conveyed to the viewer through the artist’s meticulous craftsmanship, blending disciplines like textile, installation, and video.
A Space of Memory in Berlin
Zilberman Berlin’s gallery space transforms into a meditative stage for Polat’s uncanny yet powerfully narrated “absences.” Adorned with themes of inequality, democratic pains, and displacement, this exhibition prompts the viewer to ask: “When everything is slipping away beneath our feet, what do we have left to hold on to?”
