Raphael Pohl & Theodor Nymark, Who’s in charge here? Art of a New Generation at ECK Museum of Art, Brunico

There’s a silence that precedes language. It’s the same hush that greets you at the entrance of the Eck Museum of Art: not unsettling, but preparatory. On the first floor of this space, formerly known as the Stadtmuseum Bruneck, a collaboration unfolds that feels less like a conventional exhibition and more like a quiet conspiracy between two minds. Theodor Nymark and Raphael Pohl, born a year apart in two distant yet kindred countries, have composed a spatial correspondence. As you move through the rooms, you wonder: where does one artist end and the other begin? But perhaps that’s the wrong question. Here, authorship is a ghost, an echo.

The atmosphere is both restrained and dense. Low lighting, dark walls, and architectural interruptions, doors, columns, stairways, become theatrical cues, breaks in rhythm, passages. The space isn’t filled; it’s weighed, measured. Some works are encased in transparent vitrines, like relics from a forgotten but oddly intimate era: an analog camcorder, vitamin bottles, a waving cat figurine, batteries, electronic detritus. Items without aura, and for that very reason, haunting. Other pieces lie directly on the floor: rods, cords, inert structures that feel as if a single gesture could activate them. Movement through the show isn’t linear; the viewer is asked to consider not just what they see, but how they move.

Here, matter is never neutral. The materials, low-placed video projections, found objects laid like traps for attention, glowing spheres that resemble captive moons, aren’t just vessels for content. They are the content. Every technical choice counts: the cold clarity of plexiglass, the temperature of the light, the silence (or its precise disruption), the slow tempo imposed by the installations. Nothing is accidental, yet nothing is explained. Instead, we are invited into process, not observation.

What surfaces is a diffuse fragility, but also a search for resonance. The archive at play isn’t merely historical, it’s emotional. These gathered materials seem to whisper: “Look at me. Do you remember?” Not nostalgic, but with a sly sense of irony. Nymark and Pohl work by subtraction, letting time accumulate on things like dust, or thought.

And in the end, what remains isn’t a phrase, but an image: glowing orbs scattered across the grey floor, bound by cords like exposed nerves. A minefield of everyday poetry. You turn around, and a door clicks shut behind you. You’re unsure if you’ve exited the exhibition, or if you’re still inside.

You should go. Not to understand, but to feel.

Who’s in charge here? Art of a New Generation

by Raphael Pohl & Theodor Nymark,

curated by Gino Alberti,

at ECK Museum of Art, Brunico,

13.06.25 – 20.08.25.