BERLIN.- Peter Wächtler’s forthcoming exhibition Ständig at Haus am Waldsee brings together new and existing works, most notably a new eponymous film. Through classic animation and elaborate set construction with extreme angles and distorted perspectives, the film draws on techniques from theatre and early cinema. Based on a poem by the artist, it stages formulaic movements and speech across four chapters, arranged around the inherent logics of the German conjunctions “und,” “oder,” “aber,” and “denn” (and, or, but, because).

Wächtler’s elaborate practice goes beyond fixed classifications. He writes, draws, paints, makes films, builds sculptures and film sets to transform genres and narrative styles into a delicate interplay between longing and logistics. Over the last two decades he has developed a formal language that engages with the supposed comfort of the past to reveal the contradictions of self-determination and self-abandonment in contemporary terms.

The title of the show, Ständig, can be translated as “ongoing” but also “incessantly”, probing the artist’s interrogation of cultural weight and canonical legacy as something that can be both grounding and crushing. Through a language of visual shorthands that draws on figurines, animal sculptures, paperweight motifs, and other forms of industrial design, the work invokes historical events and bygone eras. His figures also convey a sense of vague familiarity for being based on fables and popular culture in which animals and fantastical creatures mirror our need to make sense of things. Yet, taken out of context, they haunt the artist’s visual world like vestiges, channeling diffuse fears and emotions.

The exhibition Ständig brings together Wächtler’s offbeat works in vignettes of three, evoking cultural conventions only to uncover their permeability and question their pertinence to the present day.

The new film by Peter Wächtler was generously supported by a residency at Callie's Berlin.

Curated by
Anna Gritz

Since...
Sophie Kovel: Gigantomania
October 16, 2026–January 17, 2027

The exhibition series Since…, presented as part of Haus am Waldsee’s 80th anniversary program, continues in the café, the villa’s former garage. In its third and final chapter, titled Gigantomania, artist Sophie Kovel turns her attention to the nearby Studio Babelsberg. Kovel reads the historical entanglement between Germany’s film industry and the former residents of Haus am Waldsee during the Nazi era as a starting point to trace the continuity of a global complex of image production aimed at impact and monumentality.

Curated by
Pia-Marie Remmers