Gallery Portrait
PSM

While studying anthropology and art history, Schmidt was greatly influenced by Okwui Enwezor’s 2002 Documenta. “I’ve never had a singular vision with focus on specific themes or media. Rather, I am looking for authentic voices from different areas,” says Schmidt. Before founding PSM, she worked for a long time as programme coordinator at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, an institution that has traditionally been interested in the meeting points of different cultures.

But, as is the nature of institutions, artists come and go once exhibitions and projects are over. Galleries, on the other hand, rely on long-term relationships with their artists. One might expect the institutional world to have reservations towards the market, but really, both are intimately intertwined. Artworks that end up in institutional shows are mostly borrowed from private collections or galleries, and without art dealers, this system could not function. “I’ve always found it fascinating,” says Schmidt, “to see eye to eye with people, and to do the business directly.”

Berlin may be home to many galleries, but a truism about the city says that there is no viable art market. Schmidt disagrees. She asserts that there are a large number of young, politically aware, and adventurous collectors. Fittingly, PSM takes measures not to bolster the catalogue with fair-friendly, easily marketable art.

Falsnaes, for example, is one of PSM’s best-selling artists, although he mainly produces things that are difficult to sell, conserve, and stage. Large museums have only recently begun to collect performance, and the Dane is represented in a few public collections—including the Centre Pompidou and the Kunstmuseum Krefeld—and his career has become a reference for other performance artists. “I told him, I’d like to represent him. Not as a figurehead for the gallery, but as an economically viable position.”

Among these unique positions is Iris Häussler, a Canada-based, German-born artist, whose show Seventeen Grams of Longing was on view at the time. Häussler tells stories of fictional artists, and she does so by creating their oeuvre. Often enough, they are stories that could—or should?—have been told, along with found objects that have fallen through the crevices of art history. “Positions that I haven’t seen quite like that are very alluring. That’s why my programme doesn’t follow one specific topic, just like the artists focus on different things,” says Schmidt. To Schmidt, it is essential that the pieces have an effect on viewers, which, she says, works best when the artists have internalized their subjects. “Just like Nadira Husain’s aesthetic, which comprises elements from her own symbolic alphabet.”

Husain’s work, which incorporates different media, was on view for Gallery Weekend Berlin in 2024. One space in the gallery featured three figures, composed of ceramic limbs and garment-like, large textiles that stretched all the way to the high ceilings, similar to a series of works Husain refers to as Ancestors. The works deal with migration—deliberate and forced—and the things migrants carry. Husain is fascinated by cultural hybridity; she herself grew up in France while one of her parents is from India, and her work is rich with symbols and influences.

“Artworks that allow me to learn fascinate me,” says Schmidt. “The works can be beautiful, but they don’t have to. However, they need to have an effect on people, and that works best when artists have internalized their subjects.”