If There Is Tension

How are we living within the fracture? Where does it reside, and how does it become visible?

This question has guided a half-year process of research, exchange, and collaboration, culminating in the upcoming exhibition If There Is Tension (11.09.2026–17.09.2026), curated by Silvia Russo and hosted at Salon am Moritzplatz, a former site of custody and treasury that was once conceived in accordance with the principles of conservation, protection and restricted access. Still intact, its original vault carries the memory of a place where what was worth protecting was kept and controlled. Within the exhibition, this legacy becomes a starting point to reflect on what remains contained, what escapes, and what continues to move despite systems of control. Here, artists Friedrich Andreoni and Pharaz Azimi activate the layered history of the building through new site-specific pieces, presented for the first time during Berlin Art Week.

Their artworks explore how human experience reveals itself amid unresolved conditions: between memory and progress, freedom and control, movement and containment. Within this convergence, the exhibition and its Public Program manifest as a suspended condition of our present, set in a context where fragmented histories remain inscribed in the spatial and social fabric of the city, persisting as forces that shape and displace the present. A present that, like the space - built along the former line of the Wall that divided East and West for decades - holds on to more than it releases. 

The interdisciplinary practice of Andreoni (b. 1995, Italy) spans sound, sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, and video. For the exhibition, the artist presents a new production that envelops visitors from the threshold in a sound at once deafening and almost intrusive, held at the intersection of matter and immateriality: I don’t wanna meet the King (2026), a flock of frenzied parrots suspended in motion, symbols of a flight emptied of any will of its own. Their flight suggests freedom while remaining trapped within repetition. Their circling motion seems to organise itself around the absence of a centre, evoking systems that keep running by inertia and a refusal of authority, of origin, and of arrival. Two further interventions - one sculptural and one sonic - accompany the descent towards the vault, transforming the space into an apparatus where an incessant demand for silence and control takes hold.

Azimi’s practice (b. 1987, Iran) begins with an observation of everyday objects, surroundings, and the systems of production and circulation that organise contemporary life. His installations emerge from personal memories and lived experiences, altering familiar objects into carriers of emotional and historical traces. Gradually emerging across the space, a series of objects begins to reveal itself — partially concealed, embedded within corners, lodged between walls, as though the space itself had attempted to absorb them. Works that yield their images only to those who choose to come close, and to look until they cross a threshold of intimacy. Among these is Masking Inner Rain (2026): with irony and satire, brightly coloured sponges show their perfect smiles while masking what they take in — unresolved truths that surface the artist's own memories and perceptions, reaching from a single life to a shared condition where the personal becomes political.

Today, we inhabit a present that resists being reduced to a linear sequence. The exhibition takes the fracture of our time as its point of departure: a condition we are already living within, marked by uncertainty, opposing forces, and the difficulty of finding stable ground.

Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, written shortly before his death in 1940 and presented here as the compass of the exhibition, articulated a view of history that does not unfold through continuity but accumulates through discontinuities; one in which what appears as progress remains inseparable from collapse, and where the present does not follow the past in a linear progression but carries it within itself as tension, as pressure, as an unresolved force.

Rather than offering distance or resolution, If There Is Tension asks what it means to remain within a state of tension, to confront it, and to find ways of inhabiting it.

11-17 September 2026

SALON AM MORITZPLATZ

Oranienstraße 58, 10969 Berlin

Opening

11 September 2026

6-10 pm

Cycle of Performances

12 September 2026

7-9 pm

Finissage \ Poetry Reading

17 September

6-9 pm

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Conceived as an extension of If There Is Tension, the Public Programme is co-curated by Zita Leutgeb and Silvia Russo, unfolding in close dialogue with the exhibition’s spatial and conceptual framework. Bringing together sound, movement, and poetry, the programme expands the exhibition’s investigation of tension, focusing on the voice as a medium: its presence, absence, suppression, fear, and emotional weight. It will approach the voice as a physical and political condition, shaped by pressure and resistance.

Alongside artist-led activations of the space, the programme will include multilingual tours on the 15th of September from 3:00 pm to 5 pm, held in English, German, Italian, and Farsi.

The programme opens with an evening of performances by artist Won Park and sound-voice performer Matto Zoppi.

Won Park: 

For her performance at Salon am Moritzplatz, the artist's personal annals become spoken words and gestures, repeated three times as they descend through the levels of the space, arriving differently each time. On the ground floor, it moves as photons, physical light, measured and exact. On the staircase, viewers close their eyes; a light moves across their phosphenes, and the story continues inside a darkness no one else can see. Underground, it returns as phosphine, the flame that seeps from a body already decomposed, a will-o'-the-wisp, light returning from what has vanished.

Matto Zoppi:

At Salon am Moritzplatz, Zoppi presents LIMP. A body moves through the space, microphones and cables extend outward, tracing lines of force that bind, pull, and transmit, threading through the room and through the people in it. The apparatus and the performer remain mutually dependent: a system of constraint and release that implicates whoever it reaches. LIMP investigates the physical and relational dimension of sound production: what a body generates when it strains toward relation – with objects, spaces, and presences that surround it, and what those forces do in return. The space becomes a field of thresholds: between gesture and sound, between what is captured and what escapes, between proximity and withdrawal.

The exhibition will close with an evening of poetry, bringing together Writers Nina Hanz and Hilary White for a reading that extends the exhibition’s reflection on voice, memory and what remains suspended between presence and disappearance. Taking place within the layered spaces of Salon am Moritzplatz, the reading will offer a final moment of encounter, allowing words to circulate through the exhibition space as the project draws to a close.