Again and Again and Again was an exhibition curated at HilbertRaum, Berlin in September 2025 featuring work by Johanna Adebäck & Merve Ertufan, Dave Ball, Cécile Dupaquier, Nils Benedikt Fischer, Heiner Franzen, and Nam Duc Nguyen.
The exhibition brought together a group of artists who work with repetition. While the speed and ease of AI impresses us with its ever-more accomplished output, its words, images, and sounds move within ever-decreasing circles of statistically probable, bland, and repetitive imitations of what already exists. The artists in this exhibition work with a different kind of repetition, whose recurring and recursive themes and practices spiral outwards in possibility.
From Heiner Franzen’s unsettling looped imagery of a footballer’s long walk back to the centre circle after missing a penalty to Johanna Adebäck & Merve Ertufan’s maddeningly insistent exchange of mutual compliments, from Cécile Dupaquier’s meticulous building up of a grid of straight pencil lines to Dave Ball’s attempt to illustrate every word in the dictionary beginning with G with a drawing of a different leaf from the same tree, from Nils Benedikt Fischer’s slow, cyclically revolving basins of liquid to Nam Duc Nguyen’s repeated attempts to find a solution to the same abstract painterly problem with each new painting, all of the repetitive works in this exhibition achieve an unexpected singularity by refusing the lure of the singular.
The following works were included:
Dave Ball (2025–ongoing) A to Z: Gable to Gyroscope (Leaf Drawings), series of drawings of a different leaf from the same tree for each word beginning with G in the dictionary. Part of A to Z (2011–ongoing), a project based on the act of visualising every word in the Concise Oxford English dictionary in alphabetical order. Within certain defined limitations, c. 10,000 visualisations will need to be made, taking around 35 years to complete. Each letter is defined by a specific medium or conceptual parameter (the As were drawings, the Bs drawings done entirely from memory, the Cs photographs, the Ds drawings done “blindly”, the Es an improv performance, and the Fs responses on video by the artist’s own children).
Nils Benedikt Fischer (2024) Inhabited Basins, kinetic sculptures; aluminium, stainless steel, brass, DC-motor, wires. With the perpetually shifting revolutions of the bowls, the notes, maps, biographical markers or reminders engraved inside sink below or rise above the surface of the liquid, which, for the artist, becomes emblematic of the separation between the conscious and the unconscious.
Cécile Dupaquier (2024) Tableau (grisaille, 140 x 90) no. 1, graphite on HDF panel, blackboard paint. Produced without a specific end-point in mind using a specially constructed straight-edge tool, the slow, repetitive, and physically-demanding accumulation of pencil lines builds generates what the artist understands as a kind of melancholy.
Heiner Franzen (2014) Günter Netzer nach dem Elfmeter, video. Santiago Bernabeu Stadium, September 1, 1973, Real Madrid vs. Castellon. It is football player Günter Netzer's first day of work abroad. He is on the pitch for Los Blancos, as one of two non-Spanish players. For the Germans he is a hero, a bon vivant and a rebel. The Spanish players don't like him. In the 15th minute of the game he grabbed the ball for a penalty after a foul in the penalty area. He misses. Instead of encouraging him, his teammates walk away from him. He trudges back into the field alone.
Nam Duc Nguyen (2024) White Blue Nr. 5; Black Nr. 1; Magenta Nr. 2; Chance Realignment; Red Nr. 1.; custom oil paint and gesso on canvas. Emerging from his research into the materiality of paint, the artist seeks to move beyond the limitations of manufactured materials by producing his own oils paint and gesso. The paintings are the result of a repetitive process of testing these paints, the repeated layering and framing motifs employed forcing the artist to confront and overcome his fear that seriality and repetition could diminish the open-ended experimental nature of the process.
Johanna Adebäck & Merve Ertufan (2012) Compliments, video, 1 hour. The two artist- performers compliment each other in turn for an hour, their dialogue moving from friendly affection and sincerity to moments of desperation, absurdity, and even provocation. Through the imposition of a simple rule and the repetitive act that follows, the psychological dynamics of interpersonal communication and the quality of the performers’ facial expressions and language are pushed to their limits as conveyors of meaning.
The exhibition was curated in cooperation with Galerie Art Claims Impulse.