Join us for a walkthrough of Zuzanna Czebatul’s solo exhibition, All the Charm of a Rotting Gum, at Dittrich & Schlechtriem, unveiled during Gallery Weekend Berlin. In this show, Zuzanna Czebatul reimagines the iconic Pergamon Altar, hidden from public view until 2027, due to comprehensive renovation works at the Pergamon Museum. “Czebatul uses the opportunity to renegotiate the object: not merely as a symbol of imperial power, but as a platform for reflections on cultural heritage, processes of political appropriation and exploitation, and a history that figures prominently in Germany and that is mythologized in turn. In a dialogue with a second monumental work, a relief blending police riot gear with the geometry of Christian sacred geometry , the exhibition sheds light on the articulation and representation of state power in history and the present.”
The exhibition runs until June 21, 2025. Subscribe and hit the bell for more art videos.
Zuzanna Czebatul: All the Charm of a Rotting Gum / Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin. May 2, 2025.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Zuzanna Czebatul’s work is defined by an exacting study of the complex interactions between power, ideology, and their cultural forms of expression. Harnessing monumental relics, infrastructures of commemoration, and architectural interventions, she analyzes how political systems engender an aesthetic of hegemony. Her works address the largely concealed mechanisms that shape social realities and cultural identities, and challenge fundamental principles such as durability, creation, and stability, contrasting them with disintegration and fluidity. With references to Western mechanisms of political rule, Czebatul uncovers the lasting import of cultural narratives that are increasingly being instrumentalized by nationalist tendencies. Her artistic interventions establish spaces that capture uncertainties of lived experience and open up fresh perspectives.
In All the Charm of a Rotting Gum, her first solo exhibition at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, which opens on occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin, Czebatul presents a work that exemplifies these preoccupations. By subjecting the Pergamon Altar to conceptual reinterpretation, she creates a temporary discursive space that extends far beyond the original’s historical and iconographic significance. The altar itself will be hidden from public view until 2027 at the earliest due to comprehensive renovation works at the Pergamon Museum. Czebatul uses the opportunity to renegotiate the object: not merely as a symbol of imperial power, but as a platform for reflections on cultural heritage, processes of political appropriation and exploitation, and a history that figures prominently in Germany and that is mythologized in turn. In a dialogue with a second monumental work, a relief blending police riot gear with the geometry of Christian sacred geometry , the exhibition sheds light on the articulation and representation of state power in history and the present.
Czebatul’s partial Pergamon Portal at Galerie Dittrich & Schlechtriem, then, frames a broader perspective on present-day cultural battles and the reality of the conditions of production and political functions of art in a post-democratic Germany. Today’s monumental projects are business parks, urban redevelopment zones, airports, gigafactories, and armament works, and they devour decades and billions even as the independent culture scene and universities are subjected to massive budget cuts. On the one hand, her frieze recounts its own media history, from excavation and restoration across the 3D scan to the techno-ritual 藽眈 (Sengū); on the other hand, though, it is also a retelling of the gigantomachy from a different angle: it may be that the respective roles and narratives are less unambiguous than we thought. How can we read them today? Culture versus nature, divine civilization versus revolutionary chaos? High culture versus subculture? Or do we discern in these figures a stylized final battle of the techno-theocracy against trans*muting cyborgs, Dark Enlightenment against Gaia hypothesis? Czebatul does well not to force a master narrative on us, instead presenting fragments that ask questions, that destabilize the monumentality of history and historiographies and turn the temple into a laboratory.
Excerpt from an essay for the exhibition by Prof. Dr. Paul Feigelfeld.
