BERLIN.- Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents the first institutional survey exhibition in Germany of artist, filmmaker, and writer Moyra Davey. Combining autobiographical elements with a research-driven ap- proach, Davey has developed a unique essayistic practice that interweaves image and text. Her work reflects a fondness for engaging with iconic texts and authors whose work spans the fields of memoir and psycho- analysis to art history, and juxtaposes deliberations on artistic creation, with personal stories drawn from her New York City surroundings and beyond.

The exhibition spans more than three decades of Davey’s practice and foregrounds the artist’s distinctive method of collaging and revisiting found or self-produced images and fragments of text. A central strand of this practice is her use of mailed, photographic prints which have been folded down to letter-size, and pos- ted directly to the galleries and institutions in which they are displayed. Among other works, the survey at n.b.k. includes a new set of photographs from Davey’s ongoing Copperheads (1990–) series; unfolded for display, these color prints exhibit surface traces testifying to their postal journeys, evoking a passage across a network of people and places.

Photographic bodies of work from the 1990s–2000s are presented in new forms, or expanded with previ- ously unprinted images, drawn from the artist’s color and black and-white archive. The presentation also highlights Davey’s experimental film practice – from her early super-8 film Hell Notes (1990/2017), which began as an exploration of Freud’s interpretations of money, to her pandemic-era experiment in asynchro- nous storytelling, Horse Opera (2019-2022), to her more recent monologic essay film Forks & Spoons (2024), an intergenerational study connecting five women photographers and wordsmiths.

Accompanying the exhibition is the publication Moyra Davey. Portrait Mode (published as part of the series „n.b.k. Exhibitions“ by Verlag Franz und Walther König, 2025), featuring a new essay by the artist.

Moyra Davey (*1958 in Toronto) lives and works in New York. Her work has been shown internationally, including at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2023); Museum of Modern Art, New York (solo, 2022); Carnegie Mu- seum of Art, Pittsburgh (2022); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (solo, 2020); documenta, Kassel / Athens (2017); Mumok, Vienna (solo, 2014). Davey received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020 and the Scotiabank Photography Award in 2018. Recent books include Index Cards: Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 2020), and The Shabbiness of Beauty (London: Mack, 2021).