The Work That Didn’t Work was an exhibition curated at HilbertRaum, Berlin in October 2026 that explored those moments in an artist’s practice when the thing they are working on just doesn’t quite “work”. As ostensible failures, the works included offered compelling insights into the working practices of the artists who made them, echoing John Cage’s mantra that ‘Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.’
The logic of the contemporary artworld – symptomatic, perhaps, of a wider social atychiphobia, or fear of failure – does not generally understand such flawed undertakings as worthy of exposure. They are kept from view, ignored, or silently manoeuvred around.
Yet they remain a vital and essential part of the creative process. Recognising the value of the artist’s insight and awareness in deciding that a work didn’t work, the exhibition aimed at a more candid and nuanced account of artistic practice – providing a counter to our screen-based world’s increasing obsession with the flawless and the mistake-free, and the risk-averse approach to creativity it brings about.
The works in the exhibition ranged (according to the artists) from the curiously unengaging to the formally irresolvable, from the impossibly complex to the painfully overthought, and from works that had lost their status as artworks to works where even the curator wasn’t sure whether they were ever actually meant to be works.
These instances of apparent failure offered the visitor a window into something essential about the way the artists work and think – both as creative practitioners, and as human beings.
Images and details of works coming soon...