BETHAN HUGHES

DOMINIQUE HURTH

We are back in Berlin for the opening of the exhibition To want the world in a glass hat. featuring the works by Bethan Hughes and Dominique Hurth and in collaboration with the space Neun Kelche. We are excited to see you at the opening and enjoy a drink together before we take a holiday break!

Bethan Hughes and Dominique Hurth each draw on long-standing, research-driven practices, critically examining social norms, marginalized voices, and the materiality of objects. In this joint exhibition, the artists connect through the title To want the world in a glass hat. —drawn from the poem New Year on Dartmoor, by Sylvia Plath (written 1961-62, published 1981)— and reimagine the project space as a resonance chamber. In a literal sense, they engage with the project space and its architecture: the large glass fronts carry a site-specific sound installation. In a metaphorical sense, they address structural questions about normativity, who is heard and in which space, what is visible, and what remains hidden.

The collaborative project To want the world in a glass hat. brings together the two art spaces/initiatives, Display (Marie DuPasquier) and Neun Kelche (Kira Dell and Laura Seidel) with artists Bethan Hughes and Dominique Hurth. The core of the project is the network of solidarity with power-critical and collaborative perspectives that connect us in our curatorial work.  

Bethan Hughes’ audiovisual installations, sculptures and texts interweave archival research and speculative narrative to explore the unnatural ecologies generated through industry, commerce and technology. Her work has been exhibited at venues including LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón (SP), gnration, Braga (PT), Kunstpavillion, Innsbruck (AT), nGbK, Berlin (DE), Ars Electronica, Linz (AT), Haubrok Foundation, Berlin (DE), and HAUNT/frontviews, Berlin (DE). In 2023, she was a European Media Art Platform fellow and in 2024, she completed an Art & Ecology residency at MuseumsQuartier Vienna. She studied Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art and Media Art at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and completed a PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. She is currently working on her first monograph, forthcoming early 2025 with K. Verlag. Titled Elastic Continuum, it traces the material and symbolic transformations of a rubber-containing plant better known as the Kazakh dandelion. 

Dominique Hurth  is a visual artist working with installations, sculptures and editions. The starting point for new works is often a narrative that is present in places or images. Even though her installations often concentrate on the form, extensive and detailed research is firmly anchored in the development of this form. Her works have been exhibited in museums and art institutions internationally (including Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Fundació Tapies, Barcelona; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; l’appartement 22, Rabat) and are part of several collections. She was the recipient of many prizes and residencies, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016-17), the Prize of the Berlin Senate / Governing Mayor of Berlin at the ISCP, New York (2014), the Berlin Artistic Research Grant in the years (2022-23) and Villa Kamogawa, Kyoto (2025). Her latest book titled “Stutters”, published and commissioned by Printed Matter (NYC), was released in July 2021. It focuses on several years of archival research in the photo collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. In 2025 a solo exhibition in two chapters at the memorial of Ravensbrück will conclude her long-term investigation of the textile history and cultural appropriation of the female guard uniform (of the former concentration camp of Ravensbrück) with the support of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

Neun Kelche is a project space curated by Kira Dell and Laura Seidel at Pasedagplatz in Berlin-Weißensee. In May 2024, the artist Neda Naujokaitė joined the team in the area of press and public and public relations and as assistant curator to the team. Since the beginning of 2021, local artists have found a space for exchange and encounters here. The program is shaped by the local community and developed further in collaborations on a national and international level. Neun Kelche works mainly with FLINTA* artists. In solo or duo exhibitions, site-specific installations are created, which are expanded performatively or with film/video/sound. The curatorial work of Kira Dell and Laura Seidel is based on a fundamentally power-critical and intersectional perspective. Thematically, they focus in particular on utopias of the planetary coexistence of human and non-human agents, ideas of collective love, social perspectives on parenthood and the potential for action of artistic materials. Instead of prescribing a rigid curatorial program, a collaborative negotiation process and in-depth studio visits are used to find thematic overlaps with artists and develop the exhibitions together. The Neun Kelche team takes a critical look at the working structures in the art world and the starting point of the curatorial work is to develop an exhibition program.

The exhibition is kindly supported by Hollweg Foundation and the Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt