Earth's Shadow, Moon's Crust

Artists:
Alice Dittmar
Stella Geppert

with
Seiji Morimoto
Lyllie Rouvière

Curator: Ece Pazarbaşı

Opening and Public Programme
Friday, 6 June, 18:00

Waxing Gibbous — 6 June 2025, 21:00 - 21:30
TYCHO, performance by Seiji Morimoto

Waning Gibbous —14 June 2025, 16:00
Guided Tour with the Artists and the Curator

New Moon Phase — 28 June 2025, 18:00 - 19:00
MORNING MOON, performance by Stella Geppert with Lyllie Rouvière

Waxing Crescent — 24 August 2025, 16:00
Finnisage

Originally constructed as a public toilet for ship captains navigating the adjacent canal, Kunstbrücke am Wildenbruch carries an unexpected yet poetic past. Nestled beneath the Wildenbruch bridge in Berlin-Neukölln, the space has transformed over time from a utilitarian stopover into a cultural site — a hidden architectural relic reimagined as an exhibition venue. Its layered history as a functional, intimate, and often overlooked space subtly informs the works on view, offering a unique context for reflecting on the cyclical, hidden, and transitional qualities explored in the exhibition.

Set beside the reflective waters of the Neuköllner Schiffskanal at Kunstbrücke am Wildenbruch, Earth’s Shadow, Moon’s Crust explores humanity’s timeless fascination with the moon and our intrinsic connection to it. The exhibition draws on celestial rhythms, solstices, and lunar phases to explore the ways our understanding of the Moon is inevitably filtered through earthly perceptions: water, breath, clay, memory, and the human body. Anchored in the architectural and ecological specificities of Kunstbrücke am Wildenbruch, the exhibition to unravel deeper truths about our celestial neighbor and ourselves.

Two Berlin-based artists, Alice Dittmar and Stella Geppert, engage in parallel yet distinct inquiries into embodied experience, perception, and planetary interconnection. Their works converge in this site-specific constellation, transforming the exhibition space into a terrain of lunar reflections, subtle movements, and inner tides.

Alice Dittmar’s works translate the surrounding environment of Kunstbrücke — water, light, architecture — into meticulous, contemplative image-objects. Following a formal strategy that is deeply influenced by her extended periods in Asia, particularly in China and Taiwan, where classical Shanshui painting techniques offer a perspectival multiplicity that invites the viewer into the landscape rather than placing them outside it. Dittmar's drawings carry this same spirit: they are not windows, but atmospheres — absorbing and reflecting both place and presence. Her ongoing Moon Series resonates with this perspective. Inspired by Japanese printmaker Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s iconic woodblock series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885–1892), Dittmar captures moons collected from her global journeys, each treated with meticulous pen strokes that metaphorically depict the moon’s continual rhythmic emergence and disappearance—its breathing. In the series, each moon is inscribed with fine, repetitive lines, suggesting both reverence and erosion. These drawings do not merely depict celestial bodies — they embody the breathing rhythm of the moon’s perpetual cycle of appearance and disappearance, grounded in earthly ink and hand-drawn time.

The sculptor, choreographer, and somatic researcher Stella Geppert brings a series of sculptural and performative works to the exhibition, in which she continues her exploration of organs. In this exhibition, her practice centers on the interplay between inner anatomy and outer gesture, between organs and orbits, between the rhythms of communication and those of cosmology. In the sculptural installation Multi-Organs (Older than Humans), the clay body organs stretch across mirrored acrylics, proposing a material conversation between inner life and cosmic space. Star Holder, a metal and textile object suspended in space, echoes this celestial relationality, suggesting the act of carrying as a bodily resting station—inviting the audience, perhaps, to pause while contemplating the moon. Her video piece La Modulation Sismographique documents a performance in which the artist, uses sound and gesture to trace and awaken the body’s internal organs. Located in an intimate tiny room resembling a show space in this historic toilet, the vibrational and vocal modulations emerge as a form of bodily resonance.

The exhibition unfolds in tandem with the lunar calendar, inviting audiences to attune to the Moon’s phases not only visually, but experientially. This alignment begins on the opening day on 6 June 2025, during the Waning Gibbous, with a live sound performance by Seiji Morimoto titled Tycho. Named after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose observation of a supernova in 1572 changed humanity’s view of the stars, Morimoto’s piece engages with feedback systems, contact microphones, and subtle electronics to evoke the vibrational frequencies of celestial phenomena.

On 28 June, during the New Moon, Stella Geppert shows in her latest performance Morning Moon (Co-Navigating) together with dancer Lyllie Rouvière that the body is subtly - planetarily - connected with every step in the cycle of the lungs, and the diaphragm. Using a harmonica, both immerse themselves sonically in the surrounding space. With her distinctive language of embodied mark-making, Geppert proposes that the body is not merely a vessel but a landscape, one that can channel unseen energies through movement, sound, and form.

Through its integration of artistic gestures and lunar phases, Earth’s Shadow, Moon’s Crust emphasizes how our perception of the Moon is fundamentally shaped by terrestrial experiences—rooted in the rhythms of our bodies, the landscapes we inhabit, and the sensory memories that guide our cosmic imagination.

- Ece Pazarbaşı

www.kunstbruecke-am-wildenbruch.de/en