BERLIN.- Charmaine Poh (born 1990, Singapore), Deutsche Bank "Artist of the Year" 2025, will present her solo exhibition Make a travel deep of your inside, and don't forget me to take at the PalaisPopulaire from September 11, 2025, to February 23, 2026. The artist, who lives in Singapore and Berlin, works with video, installation, and performance. In her multimedia narratives, Poh explores themes such as identity, power structures, feminism, and queerness in Southeast Asia. Her works weave together multiple perspectives and perceptions, past and future, into a flowing stream of consciousness.
“Charmaine Poh's works revolve around self-empowerment in a world where the boundaries between reality and virtuality are increasingly blurred," explains Britta Färber, Head of Art and Culture at Deutsche Bank and curator of the exhibition. "Her gentle, vulnerable, yet persistent works send a strong message against the harshness with which the exclusion of minorities and the socially disadvantaged is increasingly ignored and marginalized today.”
Charmaine Poh was nominated by Stephanie Rosenthal, director of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project. “In her work, Charmaine Poh often explores intimate, self-chosen relationships that go beyond traditional family ties,” says Rosenthal. “She is also guided by concepts such as Édouard Glissant's notion of opacity—the claim to remain opaque, ambiguous, and complex.”
In Make a travel deep of your inside, and don't forget me to take, Poh addresses time travel, ecology, responsible action, and resistance. The video work The Moon is Wet (2025), created especially for the exhibition , reflects the different facets of Singapore: from the financial district, a central hub for global trade, to the endangered mangrove forests on the outskirts of the city, threatened by the metropolis' growing demand for water and land reclamation. The three-channel video installation weaves together three narratives: that of Mazu, the sea goddess who is important across the South China region; of the “Majie,” migrant domestic workers in Singapore; and of a contemporary domestic worker from Indonesia. Poh gives space to their forgotten stories and marginalized voices, weaving them into a trilingual discourse on oppression, solidarity, and collective action.
Her film What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world, which premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2024, focuses on tender, vulnerable moments: queer couples speak about their feelings, fears, and the decision to start a family in Singapore despite legal hurdles and social rejection.
In films such as public solitude (2022) and GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY (2021-23), Poh processes her traumatic experiences as a child television star in Singapore in the 1990s. Using AI and archived footage, she creates a deepfake avatar of her younger self— a response to the sexualization of her childish body and the media attention it received.
A publication will be released by Kerber Verlag to accompany the exhibition.
