Through the Eyes of a Child was an exhibition curated at HilbertRaum, Berlin in August 2024 featuring work by Dave Ball, Linda Blüml, Sebastián Díaz, Hannah Goldstein, Daniel Schieferdecker, Pilvi Takala, and Katharina Ziemke.
The exhibition brought together a group of works that thematised the relationship between artists and children. Whether through collaborating with children, representing children and their world, or responding to how having children shapes their own world, the artists in the exhibition adopted a variety of approaches to exploring the interconnectedness of the worldviews of adults and children.
Steering clear of clichéd ideas of childlike creativity such as Picasso’s claim that it took him “four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”, the works in the exhibition presented a more critical and complex understanding of the coming-together of artists and children.
When a commonplace children’s toy was metamorphosed into a prestige object of luxury, when an artist-mother relived the moment she lost her child in a crowd by diligently cutting out a child from a photograph, when the memory of an artist’s own childhood was re-presented as a haunting image divested of adults and their political chatter, when a proud artist father enterprisingly finished off his five-year-old son’s drawing of a unicorn by colouring it in, when an artist embarked on a crazed attempt to document his children responding to every word in the dictionary beginning with F, and when an artist won a prestigious artworld prize and handed over the thousands of Euros of winnings to a group of children to spend entirely as they wished – then, visitors were led to conclude, the world of the adult and the world of the child may not be quite so distinct as they first seemed.
The following works were included:
Linda Blüml (2007–ongoing) Prestige; series of marble sculptures that, for the artist, can only be fully understood from the perspective of a child.
Hannah Goldstein (2019–2024) Scheiße wo ist das Kind? #2, #7, #12; series of collages in which an image of a child is cut out from a found photograph. The work responds to the artist’s fear of losing her own child in a public place.
Pilvi Takala (2014) The Committee; 15-minute video. After winning the 2013 Emdash Award (a prize aimed at the production of a new artwork for Frieze Art Fair), the artist invited a group of children aged 8 to 12 from a youth centre in east London to spend her award. They were free to spend the money any way they wanted, as well as to choose how they would formulate decisions as a group. In the video, the children explain how they decided to spend the £7,000 prize money, discussing the process of decision making and the values guiding their decisions.
Sebastián Díaz (2023) Childhood; Adults Conversing in Silence #2; Self-Portrait #8; oil on canvas. Drawn from memories of his own childhood in Chile, the paintings explore what the artist sees as the elusiveness of the real, and the uncertainty of photographic imagery.
Katharina Ziemke (2023) Episode 7: Highway, Reflections of a 14-year-old (GC); 9-minute video. Superimposed over a slowly evolving ink image, a speaker, G, can be heard recounting what he has heard about climate change. Questioning his own involvement, and feeling morally and emotional overwhelmed, the teenager proposes a rescue operation aimed at saving marine life from plastic waste. Part of a series Episode: Storm that features diverse voices reflecting on our ecological responsibility in the face of climate change.
Daniel Schieferdecker (2023) Unicorn (Happy); acrylic on paper. One of a series of images of mythical creatures created in collaboration between the artist and his 5-year-old son Blixa, with the son doing the drawing, and the father adding the colour.
Dave Ball (2024–25) A to Z: The F-Words; 83‑minute video in which the artist invites his children to respond to every word in the dictionary beginning with F in alphabetical order. Part of A to Z (2011–ongoing), a project based on the premise 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”, and the Es an improv performance).
The exhibition was curated in solidarity with the stance of Pilvi Takala, who was striking against cultural institutions in Germany repressing free speech and the right to protest.
As a humanitarian crisis unfolds in Gaza, voices critical of Western complicity must not be silenced. Only dialogue, discussion, and negotiation can offer hope for our children.