SILVER LINING

“Every cloud has a silver lining.”

UdK HalbHaus and KUNZTEN are pleased to present Silver Lining, a final exhibition at Potsdamer Straße 120. True to the saying “Every cloud has a silver lining” we are opening the studio space one last time for a collaboratively organized, interdisciplinary and multimedia exhibition. While the future of the space remains uncertain, HalbHaus looks back on several years of successful work, which will be celebrated during this year’s Berlin Art Week exhibition. We firmly believe that what has been achieved will endure and continue to inspire future projects and initiatives.

The 13 participating artists will showcase their latest works, offering insights into their current artistic practices across various media, including painting, sculpture, video, and installation. The exhibition will be complemented by an interdisciplinary program of screenings, performances, and multimedia installations by artists from UdK’s Performing Arts, Sound Studies, and Costume Design departments.

“Every cloud has a silver lining.”

UdK HalbHaus und KUNZTEN freuen sich, mit der Ausstellung Silver Lining eine letzte Ausstellung in der Potsdamer Straße 120 zu präsentieren. Ganz im Sinne des Sprichworts „Every cloud has a silver lining“ öffnen wir den Atelierraum ein letztes Mal für eine gemeinschaftlich organisierte, interdisziplinäre und multimediale Ausstellung. Auch wenn die Zukunft mit dem Ende des Raums ungewiss ist, blickt HalbHaus auf mehrere Jahre erfolgreicher Arbeit zurück, die im Rahmen der diesjährigen Berlin Art Week mit Silver Lining gebührend gefeiert wird. Wir sind überzeugt, dass das Erreichte bestehen bleibt und zukünftige Projekte sowie Initiativen inspirieren wird.

Die 13 teilnehmenden Künstler:innen präsentieren aktuelle Werke und geben Einblicke in ihre künstlerische Praxis in verschiedenen Medien wie Malerei, Skulptur, Video und Installation. Ergänzt wird die Ausstellung durch ein interdisziplinäres Programm mit Screenings, Performances und multimedialen Installationen von Künstler*innen der UdK in den Bereichen Darstellende Künste, Sound Studies und Kostümdesign.

Geli Derzapf paints with oil pastels and colored pencils on canvas and paper lying on the floor. To paint, she bends over it on her knees. Ista ego sum. Derzapf paints in order to recognize herself. Paper, whether through writing or drawing, absorbs the subconscious and reflects it through symbols: “The duel between heaven and hell drives me. The color palette comes from childhood.”
Derzapf studies Painting in the class of Valerie Favre.

Siyavash Ghassemzadehgan’s sculptures usually consist of several parts. The individual volumes stacked on top of each other are simply held together by gravity. He exploits and amplifies the properties of globally available materials in modular constructions. He creates iconic architectural forms inspired by archaic proportions and basic principles of beauty and elegance. With his sculpture Concrete Plastic, Ghassemzadehgan works for the first time with corrugated sheet, which usually functions as a shaping material in his concrete sculptures. A Broken Circle consists of 8 individual parts placed on top of each other, transferring space and form as a philosophical plastic into the imagination to be reassembled anew. It represents a search for truth and the freedom to evade it.

Bailey Keogh’s work spans across mediums in efforts to distort people’s perceptions of real and imagined realities. Her works are formed from a foundation of softness and care paired with hard aesthetics. She often bridges the gaps between the tangible and the virtual within the videos, paintings, and installations she produces around topics like misinformation, disinformation, and media literacy. In her acid etching series XXX, Keogh borrows the figures of the 2000s lingerie models from signs outside of LSD at Kurfürstenstraße and deals with the seductive nature of nostalgia: “When researching nostalgia, I often looked out the window of my studio at LSD. A space romanticized amongst Berliners. But what they are nostalgic for in this space, I don’t know. It is a well-known center for human trafficking and a chain sex shop. I felt the lingerie models from the signs, far removed from anyone around, would be the best figures to illustrate nostalgia’s disconnection from actual history.”
Keogh studies Fine Art at Universität der Künste Berlin in the class of Monica Bonvicini.

In her work, Kanni Kyoungwon Oh explores the relationship between visual changes and their emotional impact. Her work is rooted in her specific visual experience caused by the physical symptoms of her eyes. Through overlaps, striking complementary colors, or white-outs, she focuses on the variability of visuals. Since visual changes go hand in hand with experiencing emotional changes, space is experienced emotionally for Kanni Oh. This is why she seeks to capture visual variability and changes on a canvas, creating opportunities for emotional interaction for viewers as well.
Kanni Oh studies in the class of Valerie Favre.

In Palimpsetic Feverdream Ontology, multidisciplinary artist, musician, writer, and researcher Kani Lent presents a multimedia installation combining oil painting, spatial sculpture, photography, digital image editing, photo transfer, layering, and readymade assemblage. Central to the work is a palimpsest that reveals and continuously overlays global references, conditions, and Lent’s personal perspective, evolving through a process of updates and reconfigurations. The photographs, taken in Tehran in 2018, were digitally reworked between 2022 and 2024. This revision was informed by Lent’s reflective engagement with the archive over time, allowing new conceptualizations to emerge. The act of revisiting these images—initially tied to another context—enabled Lent to transform them gradually, layering meaning through shifting reflections, emotions, and the passage of time. This process of translucent overwriting creates a web of overlapping contexts, employing techniques such as addition, subtraction, blurring, exchanging, and other transformative tools. As traces of memory fade, gaps are filled with dreamlike impressions, giving shape to the final work.
Kani Lent is studying at the University of Arts Berlin in the class of Prof. Dr. Hito Steyerl.

“Geoffrey LaRue and Dan Saniski are a comic duo from what every politician will tell you are the two most important places in the United States: Michigan and Pennsylvania. While they both live deeply fascinating interior lives engaging in a variety of artistic practices, they find great joy in finding new and exciting ways to murder each other. They have wrestled against Christian fascism with Dolly Parton, solved crimes on the boardwalk, kidnapped the husband of a potato heiress, sent a bad boss into another dimension, stabbed each other to some success, thrown chairs, slapped in the name of drama, and that was before brunch. We don’t talk about brunch. They were once called the Mike Nichols and Elaine May of their generation by a famous American film actress who has tragically died and can no longer be reached for comment or confirmation.” – Kyle McLachlan

In her work, Mareike Leder integrates concepts from painting and digital design. By layering ideas, colors, and distortions, she creates utopian landscapes and fantastical worlds. Zoomed-in perspectives offer glimpses into the lives of the inhabitants and creatures within. Her drawings explore the intersection of fascination with space exploration and the reimagining of traditionally male-centric fields like aerospace. Using vibrant colors, she playfully creates spaceships with exaggerated perspectives that defy technical accuracy, as symbols of inclusivity and curiosity, ready to embark on journeys to new planets and encounters with unknown life forms.
The artist works as a UX designer and will begin her Fine Arts studies at the University of the Arts in Berlin this fall.

In his work, Gerald Meilicke examines physical and psychological processes, such as inner conflicts and traumatic experiences, as well as their effects on the personality. His installation intends to give shape to the elusive and thereby seems to materialize concern. The fabrics in his paintings Paradox and Counterparadox are sewn from fragments of painted and unpainted canvas. Mounted on classic stretcher frames, they are under great tension and appear deformed, bent, fragmented, and scarred as a result of the processing. At the same time, in the resulting formation, they appear to have returned strengthened and stand by their grown physicality. Gift II is a series of ceramic balloons that seem to bear witness to a conflict between desires and desirability. They have solidified under external force and come to rest on the ground. At the same time, the material is in the process of taking on an unclear color between warning orange, poisonous green, and an energy-absorbing black.
Gerald Meilicke studies at the Berlin University of the Arts in the class of Thomas Zipp.

Mascha Naumann is a Berlin-based multimedia artist and passionate club worker. In his artistic and curatorial practice, Naumann challenges and critiques the academic art world by highlighting exploitative structures that emerge from the exhibition practice and trade of subcultural capital within institutional contexts. Naumann’s performance pseudonym, LAV ENDER, serves as both a tool and a disguise to explore systemic leveling and open up spaces for difference, while becoming aware of their own exposure within society and the art world. It also helps find ways to accompany and archive personal transformation processes. In THE ANAL STAGE: Early Sadism and queered Spaces of Shame, Mascha Naumann invites the audience to engage in a hyper-dense social space. Encouraging discomfort and distress in hegemonic society’s ultra-private sphere, they will divulge never-before-shown footage of the performance Giving Birth to Them (Anally), in a way that has progressed from their research and experimental archival practice, which navigates between subculture and an institutional art context.

In his artistic practice, Amr Nasr works with moving images, performance, sculpture, and photography to explore and express the intersections of cultural norms, race, gender, self-expression, and the power of movement, as well as how societal norms and narratives are imposed upon us. He aims to provoke thought on the social and political consequences linked to these issues. Themes such as chosen families, global citizenship, and a non-binary society are central to his work. Dafr iii presents a transparent reflection expressed in another norm, revealing the delicate interplay between beauty, pain, and scars. A reformed, careworn back emerges through visual projections, embodying transformation and resilience.
The artist studies Fine Arts in the class of Prof. Jimmy Robert. In addition to his background in architecture from ENSA Paris-Belleville and the University of Stuttgart, Amr’s upbringing in Egypt and the broader Middle East plays a pivotal role in shaping his work, which delves into cultural and political themes through a nuanced, personal perspective.

In her work, Josephine Rothäuser strives to create a playing field where opposites engage in a dance of contradiction. In this conflict in harmony, struggle and intimacy come together. She aims to meld these contrasts, much like the figures in her paintings, which collide and dissolve into one another, yet always conform to the framework they inhabit. It's akin to a tug-of-war between forces where no clear resolution can emerge. The human-made creature, existing both in reality and in paint, embodies all the attributes we project onto animals: wildness, rawness, and innocence. Painting becomes an intimate experience, a wrestling match with color where both contention and reconciliation are possible.
The artist studies Fine Arts at Universität der Künste in the class of Valerie Favre.

Marco Siciliano’s work is deeply rooted in the study of literature and architecture and expressed through a multidisciplinary approach. His work leans on the threshold between private and public space. The vision of these figures is only partially clear. Their absence or disappearance is what intrigues Siciliano the most. He creates a space in which the viewer’s experiences, desires, and doubts define uncertain contours. In his series Myopia, the decorated glass blurs the image by partially redacting the figure(s) depicted in his photographs, thus leaving it to the imagination to reconstruct. Such glass usually decorates spaces requiring discretion. The metal of the frame bends to encase the glass, leaving the corners uncovered to allow a voyeuristic glimpse of the contents concealed within. The sculpture 215 chewing gum (Goodbye) is completed with the participation of the public, who is allowed to observe and step on the sculpture like a regular doormat at the entrance to the space. With its ‘goodbye’ inscription imprinted on 215 chewed chewing gums, the doormat invites the audience to celebrate the last exhibition at HalbHaus.
Marco Siciliano studied sculpture in the class of Monica Bonvicini at the Universität der Künste, where he graduated as Meisterschüler in 2024. He previously graduated from the Politecnico di Milano (2017) with a master’s degree in interior design.

Martin Sieron’s paintings create a symbiosis between perception and the experienced, imagined, and constructed. He crafts fictional, fragmented worlds that challenge traditional ways of seeing through layers, omissions, and distortions. Sieron’s work engages with the process of memory, inviting new interpretations and ways of thinking.
Sieron is currently studying Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts under Professor Valérie Favre.

Geli Derzapf paints with oil pastels and colored pencils on canvas and paper lying on the floor. To paint, she bends over it on her knees. Ista ego sum. Derzapf paints in order to recognize herself. Paper, whether through writing or drawing, absorbs the subconscious and reflects it through symbols: “The duel between heaven and hell drives me. The color palette comes from childhood.”
Derzapf studies Painting in the class of Valerie Favre.

Siyavash Ghassemzadehgan’s sculptures usually consist of several parts. The individual volumes stacked on top of each other are simply held together by gravity. He exploits and amplifies the properties of globally available materials in modular constructions. He creates iconic architectural forms inspired by archaic proportions and basic principles of beauty and elegance. With his sculpture Concrete Plastic, Ghassemzadehgan works for the first time with corrugated sheet, which usually functions as a shaping material in his concrete sculptures. A Broken Circle consists of 8 individual parts placed on top of each other, transferring space and form as a philosophical plastic into the imagination to be reassembled anew. It represents a search for truth and the freedom to evade it.

Bailey Keogh’s work spans across mediums in efforts to distort people’s perceptions of real and imagined realities. Her works are formed from a foundation of softness and care paired with hard aesthetics. She often bridges the gaps between the tangible and the virtual within the videos, paintings, and installations she produces around topics like misinformation, disinformation, and media literacy. In her acid etching series XXX, Keogh borrows the figures of the 2000s lingerie models from signs outside of LSD at Kurfürstenstraße and deals with the seductive nature of nostalgia: “When researching nostalgia, I often looked out the window of my studio at LSD. A space romanticized amongst Berliners. But what they are nostalgic for in this space, I don’t know. It is a well-known center for human trafficking and a chain sex shop. I felt the lingerie models from the signs, far removed from anyone around, would be the best figures to illustrate nostalgia’s disconnection from actual history.”
Keogh studies Fine Art at Universität der Künste Berlin in the class of Monica Bonvicini.

In her work, Kanni Kyoungwon Oh explores the relationship between visual changes and their emotional impact. Her work is rooted in her specific visual experience caused by the physical symptoms of her eyes. Through overlaps, striking complementary colors, or white-outs, she focuses on the variability of visuals. Since visual changes go hand in hand with experiencing emotional changes, space is experienced emotionally for Kanni Oh. This is why she seeks to capture visual variability and changes on a canvas, creating opportunities for emotional interaction for viewers as well.
Kanni Oh studies in the class of Valerie Favre.

In Palimpsetic Feverdream Ontology, multidisciplinary artist, musician, writer, and researcher Kani Lent presents a multimedia installation combining oil painting, spatial sculpture, photography, digital image editing, photo transfer, layering, and readymade assemblage. Central to the work is a palimpsest that reveals and continuously overlays global references, conditions, and Lent’s personal perspective, evolving through a process of updates and reconfigurations. The photographs, taken in Tehran in 2018, were digitally reworked between 2022 and 2024. This revision was informed by Lent’s reflective engagement with the archive over time, allowing new conceptualizations to emerge. The act of revisiting these images—initially tied to another context—enabled Lent to transform them gradually, layering meaning through shifting reflections, emotions, and the passage of time. This process of translucent overwriting creates a web of overlapping contexts, employing techniques such as addition, subtraction, blurring, exchanging, and other transformative tools. As traces of memory fade, gaps are filled with dreamlike impressions, giving shape to the final work.
Kani Lent is studying at the University of Arts Berlin in the class of Prof. Dr. Hito Steyerl.

“Geoffrey LaRue and Dan Saniski are a comic duo from what every politician will tell you are the two most important places in the United States: Michigan and Pennsylvania. While they both live deeply fascinating interior lives engaging in a variety of artistic practices, they find great joy in finding new and exciting ways to murder each other. They have wrestled against Christian fascism with Dolly Parton, solved crimes on the boardwalk, kidnapped the husband of a potato heiress, sent a bad boss into another dimension, stabbed each other to some success, thrown chairs, slapped in the name of drama, and that was before brunch. We don’t talk about brunch. They were once called the Mike Nichols and Elaine May of their generation by a famous American film actress who has tragically died and can no longer be reached for comment or confirmation.” – Kyle McLachlan

In her work, Mareike Leder integrates concepts from painting and digital design. By layering ideas, colors, and distortions, she creates utopian landscapes and fantastical worlds. Zoomed-in perspectives offer glimpses into the lives of the inhabitants and creatures within. Her drawings explore the intersection of fascination with space exploration and the reimagining of traditionally male-centric fields like aerospace. Using vibrant colors, she playfully creates spaceships with exaggerated perspectives that defy technical accuracy, as symbols of inclusivity and curiosity, ready to embark on journeys to new planets and encounters with unknown life forms.
The artist works as a UX designer and will begin her Fine Arts studies at the University of the Arts in Berlin this fall.

In his work, Gerald Meilicke examines physical and psychological processes, such as inner conflicts and traumatic experiences, as well as their effects on the personality. His installation intends to give shape to the elusive and thereby seems to materialize concern. The fabrics in his paintings Paradox and Counterparadox are sewn from fragments of painted and unpainted canvas. Mounted on classic stretcher frames, they are under great tension and appear deformed, bent, fragmented, and scarred as a result of the processing. At the same time, in the resulting formation, they appear to have returned strengthened and stand by their grown physicality. Gift II is a series of ceramic balloons that seem to bear witness to a conflict between desires and desirability. They have solidified under external force and come to rest on the ground. At the same time, the material is in the process of taking on an unclear color between warning orange, poisonous green, and an energy-absorbing black.
Gerald Meilicke studies at the Berlin University of the Arts in the class of Thomas Zipp.

Mascha Naumann is a Berlin-based multimedia artist and passionate club worker. In his artistic and curatorial practice, Naumann challenges and critiques the academic art world by highlighting exploitative structures that emerge from the exhibition practice and trade of subcultural capital within institutional contexts. Naumann’s performance pseudonym, LAV ENDER, serves as both a tool and a disguise to explore systemic leveling and open up spaces for difference, while becoming aware of their own exposure within society and the art world. It also helps find ways to accompany and archive personal transformation processes. In THE ANAL STAGE: Early Sadism and queered Spaces of Shame, Mascha Naumann invites the audience to engage in a hyper-dense social space. Encouraging discomfort and distress in hegemonic society’s ultra-private sphere, they will divulge never-before-shown footage of the performance Giving Birth to Them (Anally), in a way that has progressed from their research and experimental archival practice, which navigates between subculture and an institutional art context.

In his artistic practice, Amr Nasr works with moving images, performance, sculpture, and photography to explore and express the intersections of cultural norms, race, gender, self-expression, and the power of movement, as well as how societal norms and narratives are imposed upon us. He aims to provoke thought on the social and political consequences linked to these issues. Themes such as chosen families, global citizenship, and a non-binary society are central to his work. Dafr iii presents a transparent reflection expressed in another norm, revealing the delicate interplay between beauty, pain, and scars. A reformed, careworn back emerges through visual projections, embodying transformation and resilience.
The artist studies Fine Arts in the class of Prof. Jimmy Robert. In addition to his background in architecture from ENSA Paris-Belleville and the University of Stuttgart, Amr’s upbringing in Egypt and the broader Middle East plays a pivotal role in shaping his work, which delves into cultural and political themes through a nuanced, personal perspective.

In her work, Josephine Rothäuser strives to create a playing field where opposites engage in a dance of contradiction. In this conflict in harmony, struggle and intimacy come together. She aims to meld these contrasts, much like the figures in her paintings, which collide and dissolve into one another, yet always conform to the framework they inhabit. It's akin to a tug-of-war between forces where no clear resolution can emerge. The human-made creature, existing both in reality and in paint, embodies all the attributes we project onto animals: wildness, rawness, and innocence. Painting becomes an intimate experience, a wrestling match with color where both contention and reconciliation are possible.
The artist studies Fine Arts at Universität der Künste in the class of Valerie Favre.

Marco Siciliano’s work is deeply rooted in the study of literature and architecture and expressed through a multidisciplinary approach. His work leans on the threshold between private and public space. The vision of these figures is only partially clear. Their absence or disappearance is what intrigues Siciliano the most. He creates a space in which the viewer’s experiences, desires, and doubts define uncertain contours. In his series Myopia, the decorated glass blurs the image by partially redacting the figure(s) depicted in his photographs, thus leaving it to the imagination to reconstruct. Such glass usually decorates spaces requiring discretion. The metal of the frame bends to encase the glass, leaving the corners uncovered to allow a voyeuristic glimpse of the contents concealed within. The sculpture 215 chewing gum (Goodbye) is completed with the participation of the public, who is allowed to observe and step on the sculpture like a regular doormat at the entrance to the space. With its ‘goodbye’ inscription imprinted on 215 chewed chewing gums, the doormat invites the audience to celebrate the last exhibition at HalbHaus.
Marco Siciliano studied sculpture in the class of Monica Bonvicini at the Universität der Künste, where he graduated as Meisterschüler in 2024. He previously graduated from the Politecnico di Milano (2017) with a master’s degree in interior design.

Martin Sieron’s paintings create a symbiosis between perception and the experienced, imagined, and constructed. He crafts fictional, fragmented worlds that challenge traditional ways of seeing through layers, omissions, and distortions. Sieron’s work engages with the process of memory, inviting new interpretations and ways of thinking.
Sieron is currently studying Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts under Professor Valérie Favre.