Echoes of Gaia
Aliou Diack, Jeewi Lee, Anna Steinert, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Farkondeh Shahroudi, Viron Erol Vert
22.05. – 26.09.2025
The Page Gallery
Gaia, the primordial mother in Greek mythology, is the generative force who breathes life into all existence—birthing gods, mortals, and matter itself. In Facing Gaia (2017), Bruno Latour reconceptualizes Mother Earth not as a passive backdrop or inert terrain, but as a sentient, responsive, and at times retaliatory force—an active agent entangled within the crises of the Anthropocene.
Mirroring the protracted wars, ecological collapse, and disorientations of the 21st century, Gaia’s body appears in a state of perpetual flux—torn and trembling, caught in recursive cycles of destruction and renewal, disappearance and return. She sings, she screams, she resists, she survives. In the face of her polyphonic resonance, how do contemporary artists attune themselves to her vibrations—and with what forms of response?
The exhibition Echoes of Gaia convenes six Berlin and Dakar-based artists whose practices emerge through ritualistic processes, engaging performance and material gesture as acts of invocation, transmission, and transformation. Conceiving Gaia as a breathing, pulsing presence, the exhibition explores how artistic expression can amplify the Earth’s tremors—foregrounding questions: What have we lost in our perception of the world, and what can we rediscover?
The exhibition gives form to these artistic possibilities through the practices of six artists. Engaging with performance, material sensitivity, and reactivation of myth and ancestral heritage, the artists open pathways through which contemporary art becomes a conduit—bridging human and non-human worlds, memory and ecology, interiority and communal presence. Woven together, their gestures unfold as a ceremonial invocation—summoning and reverberating the polyphonic presences of Earth and cosmos alike.
Senegalese artist Aliou Diack, shaped by the influence of his grandfather—a shaman—has embodied nature as an inseparable part of life since childhood. Scattering finely milled herbal pigments across his canvases like seeds, he enacts painting as an ecological rite of renewal. Korean artist Jeewi Lee inscribes the temporal cycles of growth and decay observed in lacquer trees. Through the traditional techniques of ottchil (lacquer) and silkscreen, she evokes the rhythms of material transformation and the layered memory of time. German artist Anna Steinert delves into the mystical and introspective potency of the mask. Her works dissolve and redraw the boundaries of painting, invoking a fluid visual language charged with ritual and inner presence.
Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra invokes Mama Pancha, an indigenous embodiment of the maternal earth, through the symbolic weight and material density of wax, channeling a mythic and hybrid landscape where human and non-human converge. Iranian artist Farkondeh Shahroudi braids and stitches synthetic hair in meticulous ritual of remembrance and resistance, reawakening suppressed bodily presence under religious and social constraint. German,Turkish artist Viron Erol Vert reimagines the moon’s cultural symbolism as a threshold for collective catharsis. His practice opens a space where memory, transformation, and mythic resonance converge.
