If There Is Tension

EXHIBITION OPENING              11.09.2026, 6 —10 pm

OPENING HOURS:                       Monday — Sunday 12 – 7 pm

CYCLE OF PERFORMANCES   12.09.2026, 7 – 9 pm

TOURS in TOUNGUES                 15.09.2026, 3 —5 pm

FINISSAGE & Poetry Reading     17.09.2026, 6 — 9 pm

How are we living within the fracture? Where does it reside, and how does it
become visible?

This is the central question guiding visitors through the upcoming exhibition If There Is Tension, curated by Silvia Russo and hosted at Salon am Moritzplatz, a former bank that was once conceived in accordance with the principles of conservation, protection and restricted access. Still intact, its original vault carries the memory of a place where what was worth protecting was kept and controlled. Within the exhibition, this legacy becomes a starting point to reflect on what remains contained, what escapes, and what continues to move despite systems of control.

Here, artists Friedrich Andreoni and Pharaz Azimi activate the layered history of the building through new site-specific pieces, presented for the first time during Berlin Art Week. Their artworks explore how human experience reveals itself amid unresolved conditions: between memory and progress, freedom and control, movement and containment. Within this convergence, the exhibition and its Public Program manifest as a suspended condition of our present, set in a context where fragmented histories remain inscribed in the spatial and social fabric of the city, persisting as forces that shape and displace the present. A present that, like the space – built along the former line of the Wall that divided East and West for decades – holds on to more than it releases.

The interdisciplinary practice of Andreoni (b. 1995, Italy) spans sound, sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, and video. For the exhibition, the artist presents a new production that envelops visitors from the threshold in a sound at once deafening and almost intrusive, held at the intersection of matter and immateriality: I don’t wanna meet the King (2026), a flock of frenzied parrots suspended in motion, symbols of a flight emptied of any will of its own. Their flight suggests freedom while remaining trapped within repetition. Their circling motion seems to organise itself around the absence of a centre, evoking systems that keep running by inertia and a refusal of authority, of origin, and of arrival.
Two further interventions – one sculptural and one sonic – accompany the descent towards the vault, transforming the space into an apparatus where an incessant demand for silence and control takes hold.

Azimi’s practice (b. 1987, Iran) begins with an observation of everyday objects, surroundings, and the systems of production and circulation that organise contemporary life. His installations emerge from personal memories and lived experiences, altering familiar objects into carriers of emotional and historical traces. Gradually emerging across the space, a series of objects begins to reveal itself — partially concealed, embedded within corners, lodged between walls, as though the space itself had attempted to absorb them. Works that yield their images only to those who choose to come close, and to look until they cross a threshold of intimacy.
With irony and satire, brightly coloured sponges show their perfect smiles while masking what they take in: unresolved truths that surface the artist’s own memories and perceptions, reaching from a single life to a shared condition where the personal becomes political.

Today, we inhabit a present that resists being reduced to a linear sequence. The exhibition takes the fracture of our time as its point of departure: a condition we are already living within, marked by uncertainty, opposing forces, and the difficulty of finding stable ground.

Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, written shortly before his death in 1940 and presented here as the compass of the exhibition, articulated a view of history that does not unfold through continuity but accumulates through discontinuities; one in which what appears as progress remains inseparable from collapse, and where the present does not follow the past in a linear progression but carries it within itself as tension, as pressure, as an unresolved force.

Rather than offering distance or resolution, If There Is Tension asks what it means to remain within a state of tension, to confront it, and to find ways of inhabiting it.

Artists: Friedrich Andreoni, Pharaz Azimi

Conceived and Curated by Silvia Russo

Graphic Design and Visual Identity: Giorgio Craparo

Editor: Lidia Barca

Critical Texts: Silvia Russo

Exhibition Assistant: Shay Ie-ju Rutkowski

Exhibition Production Support: Johann Milh

Sound Technician: Andrea Loriga

Documentation: Luca Favret, Ludwig Winter

All works courtesy of the artists

Public Programme with: Won Park, Matto Zoppi, Nina Hanz, Hilary White
Curated by Zita Leutgeb, Silvia Russo

Hosted and supported by Salon am Moritzplatz: Sophia Pettit, Anna Fasolato