27.09.2026
11:00 – 17:00
MIRROR/SPECCHIO – Screening
Kunsthaus Dahlem presents a special selection of films from Mirror/Specchio, a project curated by Başak Şenova (Türkiye/Austria) and Jonatan Habib Engqvist (Sweden), of which Kunsthaus Dahlem is an institutional partner.
About the project
Conceived around the theme of water especially for Agrigento Capitale Italiana della Cultura 2025, the original Mirror/Specchio programme* was presented at Teatro Pirandello in Agrigento in 2025. It was divided into six acts, following the model of acts in a theatre production. Kunsthaus Dahlem screens Acts 1 and 5 from the programme.
* You can read more about the complete programme in the Mirror/Specchio brochure for Agrigento 2025.
Alongside the film screening, Kunsthaus Dahlem also presents the Mirror/Specchio book. Conceived as a separate chapter of Mirror/Specchio, the book follows Zurfarari, a stray cat whose wanderings offer fragmentary glimpses of the project and the city of Agrigento.
Programme
Act 1
- The Icelandic Love Corporation: Aqua Maria
- Marja Helander: Birds in the Earth
- Hera Büyüktaşcıyan: The Labyrinth of the World, Paradise of the Heart
- William Kentridge: You Whom I Could Not Save
Act 5
- Almagul Menlibayeva: Mother Water. You kept silent, yet the knowledge is mine
- Cristiana de Marchi: Building a Fallen Wall
- Theresa Traore Dahlberg: The Ambassador’s Wife
- Isa Rosenberger: The Captain (Vladimir’s Voyage)
Total running time of both acts: 99 min. The programme runs on a loop.
The Icelandic Love Corporation: Aqua Maria
2018, Iceland, 5:20 min
Language: No dialogue
Aqua Maria presents a soprano enveloped in a dense, steam-filled environment, where condensation gradually forms on her skin and hair. As she sings, droplets thicken and eventually fall, turning moisture into an unfolding expression of tension and release. The work situates her between vulnerability and strength, shaped by the weight and dispersal of water. Through this slow accumulation, she emerges as a figure born of liquid forces, embodying both rebellion and renewal. Steam blurs distinctions between the body and its surroundings, suggesting emotional states that surface through physical processes. The piece becomes a contemplation of endurance and transformation, using water not as a backdrop but as an active presence that shapes and accompanies her shifting interior world.
The Icelandic Love Corporation – Biography
Jóní Jónsdóttir and Eirún Sigurðardóttir are the current members of The Icelandic Love Corporation (ILC), an art collective founded in 1996. They are based in Reykjavík.
ilc.is
Instagram: theicelandiclovecorporation
Marja Helander: Birds in the Earth
2018, Finland/Norway, 10:47 min
Language: No dialogue
Two young Sámi ballet dancers travel across landscapes from Lapland to Helsinki, tracing the layered tensions between Indigenous identity and Finland’s dominant culture. Their movements unfold across forests, open routes and urban sites, highlighting how cultural belonging is negotiated in both protected and contested spaces. The work touches on historical and political questions of land sovereignty and the persistent effects of colonial structures. Environmental concerns also surface as climate change threatens reindeer herding and the delicate ecosystems central to Sámi life. Through its quiet rhythm, the piece underscores the dancers’ presence as an assertion of continuity. Their journey suggests that tradition and modernity remain inseparable forces shaping Sámi experience in an era of rapid ecological and cultural change.
Marja Helander – Biography
Marja Helander is a Sámi artist and filmmaker from Finland. She works and lives in Helsinki.
Instagram: helandermarja
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan: The Labyrinth of the World, Paradise of the Heart
2022, Czech Republic, 17:16 min
Language: No dialogue, with English text
This work moves through Prague’s water infrastructures, its wastewater treatment plant and historic baths, where Büyüktaşcıyan traces how cultural memory adheres to built environments. Within the stop-motion sequences, tile-like glass beads meander between the cavities of these aquatic spaces covered with glazed Rako tiles, like vocalised contours, reverberating distilled traces of cultural appropriation throughout a historical continuum. By following these fragments, the artist brings forward questions of purity, contamination, ornament and power. The aquatic spaces act as conduits through which past and present circulate, revealing the tensions carried by their surfaces. These spaces, characteristic of Prague’s colonial past, become a threshold shaped by overlapping temporalities and shifting collective imaginaries.
The title references Czech philosopher Jan Amos Comenius’s book, where the world is portrayed as a city resembling to a labyrinth, where a pilgrim is in search of his path in life while being misguided by Falsehood and Delusion.
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan – Biography
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan is a Turkish artist of Greek-Armenian origin, born in Istanbul. She lives and works between Istanbul and Athens.
Instagram: hera.buyuktasciyan_studio
William Kentridge: You Whom I Could Not Save
2023, South Africa, 7:23 min
Language: No dialogue, with English text
Kentridge revisits the 1941 journey of the Capitaine-Paul-Lemerle, which carried numerous intellectuals fleeing Europe on a passage from Marseilles to the New World. The ship departed Marseille for Fort-de-France, Martinique, on 24 March 1941, arriving at the end of April after calling at various ports along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Africa. Kentridge describes that journey as the crossing of the Styx, wherein Charon, the ferryman of souls, wields the power to raise the dead and determines the fates of those who pass beyond. Sentences dart among the waves adorning the backdrop. The scene shifts into the cyclic motion of a vinyl record, featuring messages of hope and melancholy. The words alternate with images of André Breton, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Gandhi, Josephine Bonaparte and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. These faces, rotating within blue spirals, create syncretic collages. The past merges with the present, forming a continuous thread across many crossings of seas.
William Kentridge – Biography
William Kentridge is a South African artist who lives and works in Johannesburg.
kentridge.studio
Instagram: williamkentridgestudio
Almagul Menlibayeva: Mother Water. You kept silent, yet the knowledge is mine
2024, Kazakhstan/Germany, 15 min
Language: with English text
The work weaves together themes of extractivism, climate change, Indigenous knowledge and the political tensions surrounding the environmental crisis at Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan. By tracing the connections between water, cultural heritage and ecological survival, Menlibayeva creates a hybrid artistic language that blends AI-generated imagery with traditional handcraft techniques, forming an oratorio-like space where ancestral wisdom and contemporary technology resonate together to reflect on loss, cultural memory and ecological vulnerability. The use of AI to explore personal narratives and the shrinking ecology of Balkhash challenges anthropocentric perspectives and underscores the interdependence of humans, technology and nature. Scientists warn that the lake’s trajectory may echo the devastating fate of the Aral Sea. Declining water levels and ecological pressures caused by human activity now threaten Lake Balkhash, one of Central Asia’s largest lakes and a unique ecosystem combining freshwater and saline waters.
Almagul Menlibayeva – Biography
Almagul Menlibayeva is a Kazakh artist based in Berlin.
almagulmenlibayeva.com
Instagram: almagul.menlibayeva
Cristiana de Marchi: Building a Fallen Wall
2021–2022, UAE, 4:46 min
Language: No dialogue
Filmed in open spaces and in specific institutional buildings in the UAE, the video follows the creation of a large textile work, focusing on the meditative repetition of knitting gestures. A sense of liquidity is evoked both by the reiteration of a single movement, like waves advancing and receding in their incessant cycle, and by the resulting, growing surface, a soft, undefined, plastic volume, malleable and responsive to the conditions of its display when not tensed, stretched or solidified. Building a Fallen Wall engages with the unresolved tension between the individual and oppressive systems. As an act of empowerment, the attempt to overgrow the architecture of confinement becomes a radical acknowledgement of the potential of the bare body to oppose dominant political powers, bringing the human body to the centre of the investigation. The title of the work encapsulates the wishful absurdity of its purpose: building an architecture that is already fallen.
Cristiana de Marchi – Biography
Cristiana de Marchi is an Italian-Lebanese artist based in Dubai.
Instagram: cristianademarchi.studio
Theresa Traore Dahlberg: The Ambassador’s Wife
2018, Burkina Faso/Sweden, 16:20 min
Language: French with English subtitles
The wife of the French ambassador in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, moves through her days in quiet boredom. Occasionally, she plays a game of tennis or swims a few laps in her private pool. She once dreamed of becoming a renowned opera singer, yet now rehearses her repertoire knowing she will never appear before a real audience. A career is out of the question: the spouses of ambassadors are not permitted to work.
The poised and meticulously composed scenes reveal the contradictions and emptiness underlying a life of privilege. This discreet, sharply observed portrait of an ambassador’s wife offers a subtle but incisive commentary on neocolonial dynamics, power hierarchies, class divisions and gender inequality. As the ambassador’s wife drifts through her luxurious surroundings in search of calm, she is constantly surrounded by staff and servants, busy with labour that both sustains her comfort and ruptures her solitude.
Theresa Traore Dahlberg – Biography
Theresa Traore Dahlberg is an artist and filmmaker from Sweden based in Stockholm.
theresatraoredahlberg.com
Instagram: theresatraoredahlberg
Isa Rosenberger: The Captain (Vladimir’s Voyage)
2013, Austria, 17 min
Language: English and Russian with English and Russian subtitles
The film is about the deep relationship between a captain and the sea. At the same time, The Captain is a journey between continents and eras, between political systems and ideologies, and between reality and the world of the undead. It is a filmic portrait of the life and career of Vladimir Kogan, a captain in the former Soviet Union who sailed the world on large merchant ships and, after 1989, found himself drifting to Brighton Beach, also known as “Little Russia”, a neighbourhood in southern Brooklyn, New York City, known for its large Russian-speaking immigrant community.
In parallel, the film also revisits and weaves in the famous “Kitchen Debate”, where the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and the then United States Vice President Richard Nixon had an improvised debate on the pros and cons of communism versus capitalism in front of live TV cameras in 1959.
Isa Rosenberger – Biography
Isa Rosenberger is an Austrian artist and filmmaker based in Vienna.
isarosenberger.net
Instagram: isarosenberger
Screening times and location
The programme runs on a loop on Sunday, 27 September 2026, during opening hours: 11 am–5 pm.
Costs and tickets
The screening is included in the Kunsthaus Dahlem admission fee: see prices
Tickets are available on site.