Stepping into the gallery space along Berlin’s Potsdamer Straße, the first encounter is a leaden yet deeply resonant silence cast by suspended brass forms. With Fire Sermon, Vietnamese-born artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s inaugural solo presentation with the gallery, Esther Schipper draws the viewer into the very crux of an auditory, spiritual, and visual narrative. Running from 10 September through 24 October 2026, the exhibition convenes five new mobile sculptures that mark the latest development in the artist’s kinetic practice.
Nguyen’s artistic output is grounded in long-term field research tracing the indelible marks of the Vietnam War and colonial history upon matter itself. Howitzer shell casings and unexploded ordnance fragments, buried beneath the soil for decades, are beaten, polished, and transmuted in the artist’s hands into entirely different forms. Artifacts of violence and devastation become mobile sculptures suspended in millimetric balance, featuring brass laminates and wooden mallets tuned to precise frequencies. Drifting and turning slowly on their axes throughout the space, each piece constructs a delicate bridge between the crushing gravity of the past and a contemporary impulse toward healing.
The exhibition takes its title from the Ādittapariyāya Sutta (The Fire Sermon), a foundational discourse in Buddhist philosophy. Positing that all sensory experience burns with the fires of greed, hatred, delusion, and suffering, this ancient teaching maintains that true liberation is attainable only by relinquishing worldly attachments and passions. It is precisely on this conceptual footing that Nguyen anchors his sculptures: by transmuting the incendiary, destructive residue of war into serene, gravity-defying configurations, he clears a contemplative space for mental purification.
An organic, unbroken continuity binds the artist’s cinematic syntax to his sculptural forms. While oral histories, collective memory, and transcontinental genealogies form the backbone of Nguyen’s moving-image work—wherein documentary and fiction dissolve into one another—the kinetic sculptures in this exhibition function as spatialized, tangible reverberations of those very films. The cool touch of metal, the grain of wood, and the rhythmic choreography of form through space refuse to leave the viewer as a passive spectator before historical trauma, calling them instead into a shared act of remembrance.
Noted as one of the essential highlights of Berlin Art Week 2026, Fire Sermon remains on view at Esther Schipper, Berlin, through 24 October. With a quiet yet piercing clarity, Tuan Andrew Nguyen reminds us that tending to the wounds of history requires first touching them, and then listening closely to the sounds they yield.
