Ulrike Theusner
Passagiere der Nacht
11 SEP until 25 OCT 2025
Opening – 11 SEP 2025, 6-10 pm
Guided tours with the artist:
12 SEP 2025, 5 pm
13 SEP 2025, 2 pm

Fyler
It felt kind of warm, eternal.
There shall be what we were for others.
Smatterings, fragments of us
that perhaps they thought they glimpsed.
There shall be dreams of us that they nurtured.
And we were never the same.
Each time, we were magnificent strangers,
passengers of the night that they invented,
like fragile shadows
in old, long-forgotten bedroom mirrors.
From The Passengers of the Night, a film by Mikhaël Hers (France, 2022)
I was inspired by Mikhaël Hers’ film The Passengers of the Night, set in 1980s Paris – a film about the power and importance of relationships. It was not so much the film’s topic – the story of 50-year-old Elisabeth, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who finds her way back from her state of desperate instability to optimism and courage – but more its melancholy, its fragmented narrative style, the unspoken words in between dialogues, hovering over the images, rendering everything in a sensitive, delicate lightness, as expressed so poetically in the short final monologue.

Ulrike TheusnerPassagiere der Nacht, 2025
Monotypie
25 x 18,7 cm
Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin
This indefinable, almost indescribable quality, the tentative longing for vitality and the inescapably transient nature of a being in constant transition also resonates in the images of the monotype series City of Dreamers (2025) as well as in the pastels, as does the question of what it actually means to be human – someone who feels, dreams, and needs relationships with others in order to exist. Someone with illusions and desires, who experiences infatuation, pain, and pleasure, and does so in a world that is increasingly spiraling out of control, highly technological, in which the irritating feeling of increasing powerlessness in the face of all impending catastrophes keeps on spreading. In the end, we are modern cavemen whose basic needs have not changed for millennia. And one such basic need is closeness and connection; we are constantly seeking this, whether consciously or not, because it is essential. The images are a collection of portraits, images of caves and deserted areas, posthuman landscapes. A boy, dressed only in a towel, stands on a wasteland, a dull sun hanging above him: The last human. What if it really were like this, as laconic and unemotional as the image clashes with the title? What if the last human really stood there with their meager towel, grinning somewhat dazedly at the hostile surroundings? We are all still cavemen, after all, but now capable of operating an atomic bomb. The caves, however, allow for a completely different association; in a way they are an invitation to descend into our unconscious and unearth those hidden treasures that constitute the core of our being. As it reads in Goethe’s Dedication, translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring: “How dost thou differ from all other men? / Live with the world in peace, and know thee then!”

Ulrike Theusner
Der Agitator, 2025
Monotypie
25 x 18,7 cm
Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin
And perhaps this is also the answer to the question of what it is that makes up our humanity, a question that art has always been asking and will always ask: our ability to interact with one another, to think abstractly, to shift perspectives. And to create a world that we can visualize thanks to our imagination. This requires courage, trust, and willingness. We all live in the City of Dreamers.
Ausgedribbelt
group show
11 SEP until 25 OCT 2025
Opening – 11 SEP 2025, 6-10 pm

Flyer
Ausgedribbelt” is an exhibition series with three individual artists’ positions. On display are successive solo exhibitions by Allistair Walter (*1994), Lilith May Peters (*2001) and Robert Brambora (*1984).

Porträt AllistairWalter
Credits: Jiri Abendt