BERLIN.- Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents Berlin’s first solo exhibition by British artist Ghislaine Leung. Based on a rigorously conceptual yet deeply personal approach, Reproductions explores the administrative, financial, and infrastructural processes of exhibition-making through a series of new works. By employing strategies of withdrawal and refusal, Leung focuses on the reproductive aspects of institutional labor that decisively shape the outcome of artistic production and reception, but typically remain hidden. Reproductions foregrounds these activities, shifting attention to the many processes beyond the artist that are required to create and maintain the perceived neutrality of the contemporary exhibition format.

Leung’s exhibition at n.b.k. recognizes that artistic production is embedded within a network of institutional, individual, and societal processes and dependencies – and that institutional action itself is subject to numerous contingencies. Her works propose an approach that does not operate in spite of these dependencies, but rather treats them as material to be shaped and worked with. Since 2015, Leung’s practice has been predominantly based on scores – written instructions whose interpretation and implementation are left to the art institution and its employees. For Leung forgoing her control and opening up the vulnerability of the work acts to acknowledge this existing art industrial labour that carries and shapes the work. Including her own systems of refusal – working without an external studio, storage, or shipping, not attending installation or openings – that are part of a broader set of protocols the artist maintains as means of emotional and economical sustainability. These „sub scores“, not only attempt to refuse the culture of individuated productivity but to redistribute that capacity back into life, enabling Leung to care for her child, work her jobs, and so continue to be an artist.

Many of Leung’s scores can be activated by a single intervention or object. Despite their apparent simplicity, they give rise to a series of follow-up questions and negotiations that challenge the institutional modus operandi. They prompt institutions to consider how their own practices influence aesthetic decisions and determine conditions of production – in short, to take accountability for their role in the realization of the work. Leung’s practice makes tangible those aspects of exhibiting that guide our perception and movement without becoming visible themselves. She asks how institutional standards are internalized and reproduced through our actions. By replacing artistic control with trust and abandoning established conventions of the art system in favor of a generative process, Leung deliberately disrupts this cycle – laying bare in her absence, not only how we work, but what work we hide and why.

Ghislaine Leung (*1980 in Stockholm, lives in London) has presented her work in numerous solo exhibitions, including: Kunsthalle Basel; The Renaissance Society, Chicago (both 2024); Simian, Copenhagen (2023); Ordet, Milan; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (both 2021); Netwerk, Aalst / Belgium; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (both 2019); WIELS, Brussels (2016). In 2018, she published her book Partners (Cell Project Space), followed by Bosses (Divided) in 2023. In 2023 she was nominated for the Turner Prize.