Am 11. September findet in der Galerie Alexander Levy – im Rahmen des Gallery Weekends – eine Vernissage von Mischa Leinkauf statt. Realität, politische Strukturen und persönliche Imagination verschmelzen in einer urbanen Unterwelt.
alexander levy is pleased to announce Mischa Leinkauf’s exhibition Night on Earth. In the exhibition, Mischa Leinkauf creates a multilayered setting spanning urban reality, political order, and subjective imagination. In a large-scale video installation accompanied by photographic collages and abstract compositions, documentary observation and poetic allegory intertwine into a dense narrative about visibility, control, and escapism.
At the centre of the exhibition is a video installation whose visual spaces oscillate around the relationship between appearance and reality. An underground urban infrastructure becomes a projection surface for collective overload, a contemporary cave allegory that questions the fragility of perception and reality. What is the relationship between fragmented global conditions and the retreat into self-made realities? And how do we navigate the chaos of the surface to gain an understanding of depth? The camera moves through an in-between realm that reveals not so much a desire to escape reality as a need to deconstruct, subvert, and rethink it: a response to loss of control, overload, and constant digital stimulation. The work moves between documentary observation and staged allegory, opens filters of perception, and becomes a poetic traverse of urban underworlds.
A photographic series transposes this conceptual space to a second visual level. In collage-like montages, architectures of political power encounter places of subjective exclusion, individual re-coding, and symbolic release. Interfaces emerge between public order and personal reorientation, spaces where representation becomes fragile and alternative meanings begin to surface.
The third narrative element consists of large-format pictorial surfaces made from industrial high-reflection material as used in security contexts, who abstract imagery is derived from standardised emergency exit signage. The surfaces react to light sources and change with the viewer’s position, creating an unstable legibility. Orientation becomes an open-ended guide, without clear direction, without safe exit.
The exhibition ties in with Leinkauf’s established artistic practice, situated at the intersections of installation, performance, film, and photography. His work engages critically with territorial, social, and symbolic border zones. Central to this is the concept of Artistic Disobedience, artistic rule-breaking as a means of challenging normative structures. Cities and their architectural structures server not merely as a setting but also as conflictual, politically coded spaces that become legible anew through media transformation, while remaining subject to renegotiation.
Parallel dazu gibt es übrigens einen offiziellen Gallery Weekend Podcast mit Mischa Leinkauf.
Eröffnung: 11.09.2025, 18-22 Uhr
Ausstellung: 12.09.-18.10.2025
Alexander Levy
Alt-Moabit 110
10559 Berlin
