“Rushes” at Fluentum, Berlin: video art that breathes through the ruins of the real

What’s left of lived experience when it’s constantly filtered, fragmented, and reframed through screens? Perhaps only an echo, a digital residue flickering between apps, feeds, and lenses, or something more elusive: a faint yet persistent awareness that everything we do, no matter how mundane or intimate, might become part of a public archive. Entering Rushes, the group exhibition at Fluentum in Berlin, is like catching your reflection in a turned-off monitor: unexpected, a little disorienting, and strangely revealing. The show doesn’t prescribe conclusions; instead, it immerses the viewer in that liminal space where reality is both recorded and performed, consumed and contested, private and deeply politicized.

The setting is anything but neutral. Fluentum’s sprawling halls, housed in a repurposed Nazi-era military complex, carry the weight of historical surveillance and control, turning the building itself into a charged interlocutor. The artworks don’t merely occupy the space; they disrupt and repurpose it, folding its past into present-day concerns about visibility, power, and mediation. There’s no clear route through the exhibition: instead, visitors drift from dim corridors to flickering rooms, caught in a syncopated rhythm of screens, shadows, and synthetic sound. Each space feels both intimate and unstable, like stumbling into someone’s digital diary mid-upload.

The artists, Morag Keil, David Moser, SoiL Thornton, Phung-Tien Phan, Josiane M.H. Pozi, and Mona Varichon, share a sensibility grounded in immediacy and material accessibility. Their aesthetic resists spectacle. Nothing screams for attention; instead, there’s a quiet insistence, a refusal to monumentalize. The works lean on the vernacular of the everyday, shaky smartphone videos, ad-hoc livestreams, lo-fi surveillance clips, images that feel raw, unpolished, and disarmingly familiar. They are composed of materials readily available, technically modest, yet conceptually loaded. In this way, the exhibition draws a direct lineage from late 1980s and early ‘90s video art, yet repositions it within the digital now, an era of algorithmic manipulation, viral disinformation, and endless scroll.

Gestures abound: hands grasping phones, swiping, zooming, trembling slightly. These are not the idealized hands of classic sculpture, but real ones, fidgeting, flawed, human. The body is everywhere, not in full view, but as a presence that lingers: a reflection in glass, a breath picked up by a microphone, a fingerprint smudged on a screen. The viewer, too, becomes implicated. You’re not just observing; you’re caught in the circuitry, your gaze folded into the feedback loop.

One piece plays out entirely through the voyeurism of surveillance footage, its subjects unaware of the narrative being constructed around them. Another repurposes fragments from pop culture and digital detritus, remixing them into a new form of resistance, a kind of glitch-based storytelling that both mocks and mourns the loss of authenticity. Irony flickers through many of these works, but it’s an irony tinged with melancholy, with a quiet fury. The humor is dry, cutting, and absolutely deliberate.

Rushes doesn’t offer easy takeaways. It’s not here to affirm your worldview, or to deliver catharsis. Instead, it asks you to sit with discomfort, to dwell in the in-between. It suggests that technology doesn’t merely mediate reality, it constructs it. And if that’s true, then perhaps reclaiming our tools, our footage, our screens, is the first step in reclaiming our stories.

As you leave, there’s a lingering sense of static, like your skin remembers the glow of the monitors, the rhythm of fragmented voices, the quiet pressure of being watched. You step outside blinking, half-expecting your phone to start recording again, unprompted. And maybe it already has.

Participating artists:
Morag Keil, David Moser, Phung-Tien Phan, Josiane M.H. Pozi, SoiL Thornton, Mona Varichon

at Fluentum, Berlin
until July 26, 2025