Orbital: Alina Birkner, Johan Deckmann, Kyriaki Goni, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Parsa Hosseinpour, Melanie King, Anna Kubelik, Hannah Luxton, Roman Manikhin, Eeman Masood, Hormazd Narielwalla, Janet Vollebregt

 

‘The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour.’ Taken from Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital, this line captures the strange duality at the heart of the exhibition: the exhilaration of seeing our world from a distance, and the quiet ache that such distance can produce. Orbital, at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, brings together painting, sculpture, collage and prints by artists who look to the cosmos not for escape, but as a way of reframing our relationship with the Earth and with one another. Across their works, celestial imagery becomes a lens for thinking about vulnerability, ecological change and how we understand our place in the world.

 

Anna Kubelík presents a series of large-format prints made with ‘stardust’ and using printing blocks that capture the marks made by beetles that infested the bark of trees. Each print is an image of change, a trace of what has passed and what remains, and is paired with an audio work created in collaboration with Tarik Goetzke. In these audios, we hear the perspectives of different characters - the spruce tree, a bark beetle, a forest farmer - reflecting on the shifts in their environment.

 

A series of luminous paintings by Alina Birkner meditate on the invisible creative forces that surround the earth, dictating our natural rhythms. Colours melt together, creating fluid, expanding surfaces that suggest the vibration of energies and fusion of elements. Eeman Masood’s paintings also feature luminescent forms in magical, shapeshifting worlds - glowing peacocks, salmon, water and stars that, for the artist, speak of renewal and resilience. Guided by the principle that ‘the universe is within us’ (Rumi), Masood’s works reflect a sense of quiet harmony and wonder.

 

Two works by Melanie King reimagine NASA photographs of Mars and Saturn through an analogue process in which the images were hand-developed using plant-based, non-toxic materials. The method creates a more intimate, sensual engagement with the material and what it represents, echoing the perceptual shift experienced by astronauts as they see the world from afar. 

 

Maryam Lamei Harvani’s paintings reimagine the ancient Gol-o-Morgh miniature tradition, in which the bird represents the lover searching for the divine and the flower represents the beloved, divine beauty or a guiding light. Each composition is built through a deeply meditative process of combining thousands of dots and lines to create a shimmering, cohesive whole. 

 

A series of machine-woven tapestries depicting the landscapes of Mars, by Kyriaki Goni, explore the neo-colonial practice of space exploration and the exploitation of extraterrestrial environments. The soft tactility of the tapestries has a makeshift quality that puts forward a gentler, feminist-centred perspective - one that questions whether it might be possible to approach new terrains with care and respect. 

 

As both an artist and a practicing psychotherapist, Johan Deckmann works with cloth-covered books and found objects, using language to reflect on the complexities of life with humour and empathy. For this exhibition, he returns to painting, presenting a series of new text-based pieces. In Hannah Luxton’s work, the orb appears both as a celestial signifier and as a universal form, one that defies spoken word and traverses cultural boundaries. It is an ellipsis, suggesting potential or perhaps a void, a playful paradox for the imagination.

 

While working with a tailor on Savile Row, Hormazd Narielwalla began collecting the patterns of customers which had been shredded when they passed away and reimagining them as abstract artworks that became his Moving Constellation series. In these works, the map of the body becomes an imagined constellation, speckled with black dots, suggestive of unknown matter, dust or debris. Roman Manikhin also imagines the body, quite literally, moving through space. His playful wooden sculptures, created for the gallery’s winter garden, tell an Odyssean-type tale in which citizens of the Earth are forced to leave due to dangerous conditions. They go in search of a new home, riding on rockets or asteroids, while encountering awkward - or even sexual - situations along the way.

 

A large-scale work by Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka comprises 91 sheets of custom handmade kozo papers, onto which she has block-printed an impression of a landscape. A broken line in the image, where the paper is left bare, traces the rise in the use of the word ‘vulnerability’ as charted on a graph. Drawing on her experiences of living with bipolar disorder, the work examines how a breakdown in the climate may also be impacting our inner landscapes. Paintings by Parsa Hosseinpour use layers of fabric to similarly reflect on a feeling of collective loneliness and how that feeling might be most pronounced in crowded situations.

 

Seen together, these works suggest that distance, whether spatial or emotional, can shift our perspective, proposing new ways of relating to the world and finding a sense of belonging.