Callie's

Denzel Tristan Russell is a Caribbean-American artist who moves intuitively between mediums and materials. Working in installation, textile, music production, food pop-ups, and glassblowing, ideas and approaches often oscillate between different forms of making, allowing each to inform the other.

During his first residency at Callie’s in 2023, Denzel began focusing more closely on textiles, combining quilting, embroidery, and image transfer techniques — a practice he continued developing at Callie’s this summer.

Alongside these processes, he activated an archive of 35mm photographs collected over roughly a decade, many depicting the textures of everyday domestic life across generations of his family in the Caribbean.

Denzel’s aunt taught him to sew by making curtains, a connection that continues to inform his interest in the nebulous boundary between craft and art. By layering these photos with textiles, he considers how domestic spaces can hold neglected histories, creating what he describes as a diary of diasporic observations.

Denzel came into residency with Alice Z Jones and Cara Benedetto to work on a collaborative project that centers on the figure of the “Anti-Karen.” Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, the project looks at how the figure of “the Karen” has come to embody particular gendered and racialised ideas of victimhood, and how this figure can be mobilized in ways that reinforce white supremacy.

Alice Z Jones works with materials in states of transformation, engaging with ideas of decay, erosion, fragility, preservation, and the passage of time. Based in Berlin, her practice draws on histories and traditions of the Black and Caribbean diasporas, alongside an interest in debris, abandonment, and the traces left behind by movement and loss.
During her residency at Callie’s, Alice continued working with textiles, using natural pigment and rust dyeing, wax-resist techniques, and salt crystallization. Through trial and experimentation, she explored how these materials interact and change over time: rust oxidizes and darkens, while changes in humidity alter the formation of salt crystals.
Built up layer by layer, each intervention changes and records what has happened before, treating fabric as something never quite fixed. In this way, material transformation becomes a way of thinking about memory, history, and what survives through change.

Alice came into residency alongside Denzel Tristan Russell and Cara Benedetto to develop a collaborative project that centers on the figure of the “Anti-Karen.” Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus”, the project looks at how the figure of “the Karen” has come to embody particular intersections of gendered and racialised ideas of victimhood, and how this figure can be mobilized in ways that reinforce white supremacy.

💖 Callie’s residents to see during Berlin Art Week 2026 💖

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9th
Salim Green – “Sugar Shack” at Société · 6–10pm
Arash Nassiri – “A Bug’s Life” at Fluentum · 6–10pm

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10th
Stephanie Comilang – “Search for Life” at ChertLüdde · 6–10pm
Jeremy Shaw – “Half-Life of Grace” at Galerie Neu · 6–10pm

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11th
Omsk Social Club – Artist Talk with Theresa Reiwer at Berlin Art Week Garden · 12pm

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12th
LABOUR – “soft thought” performance at KW Institute for Contemporary Art · 8pm–12am

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13th
Omsk Social Club – Sound Walk at Natural History Museum · 2–10pm
Stephanie Comilang – Artist Talk with Elena Agudio and Christina Landbrecht · ChertLüdde · 3pm
Lucy Beech – “Out of Body” Between Bridges programming Berlin Art Week Garden Cinema · 8:30–9:30pm

We hope to see you there!

📸1: Salim Green, Film Still from “Sugar Shack,” 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Société, Berlin.
📸2: Arash Nassiri, Film Still from “A Bug’s Life,” 2026. Co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London; Fluentum, Berlin; and Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris. Produced by Chisenhale Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.
📸3: Stephanie Comilang, “Salt,” 2025. Courtesy of the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin.
📸4: Lucy Beech, Film Still from “Out of Body,” 2024. Courtesy of the artist, Between Bridges, Berlin & New Museum, New York.
📸5: Pollinator Pathmaker Summer Programme, Chapter 1: Modes of Preservation, 2024. Presented by LAS Art Foundation. Photo by Veronica Jonsson.

Barnett Cohen is an artist and choreographer whose work is grounded in q***r surrealism, collective experimentation, and grassroots activism. Based in Brooklyn, they have presented performances across the US and internationally, while also running the Mutual Aid Immigration Network, a non-profit initiative supporting immigrants and undocumented communities.

During their residency at Callie’s, Barnett is developing a new performance, pain is a cave, which will premiere at Sophiensæle on December 4th and 5th.

Barnett started the residency with the score already composed, and has now entered an extended rehearsal process that allows the work space to breathe, shift, and come into its own. In the next months, they will work with five performers from different backgrounds to translate and sculpt sections of the text and add choreography, developing the piece through experimentation.

pain is a cave combines movement vocabularies, ranging from postmodern dance, cheerleading, stage combat, rave culture, and TikTok choreography. Bringing together these forms that each have their own histories and codes, the work explores how movement can both reflect and resist social norms and structures, disrupting linear narratives of time, identity, and desire.

For the past six months, Callie’s movement studio has been bustling on Tuesday mornings with our “Class in Session” workshop series. From exploring the theoretical and didactic dimensions of movement to embodying sci-fi archetypes, the series offered free training by Berlin performers, for Berlin performers.

Our heartfelt thanks to the instructors – Melanie Jame Wolf, Jen Rosenblit, Corey Scott Gilbert, Enad Marouf, and Justin F Kennedy – for sharing their time, knowledge, and practice with such generosity.

And endless gratitude to dancer and choreographer Adam Linder, who initiated this series as part of his residency at Callie’s 💖

📸 1, 3: “Figuring it Out: Merfolx, Zombies, & Trons,” taught by Justin F. Kennedy at Callie’s, July 2026

📸 2, 4, 5: “Dramaturgies of the Absurd: The Lap Dance,” taught by Melanie Jame Wolf at Callie’s, April 2026

Research is the starting point of Kapwani Kiwanga’s process. Her work is guided by questions of how and why societies are structured the way they are, paying close attention to the ways power asymmetries are built and maintained.

Working across sculpture, installation, photography, and video, Kapwani has an aesthetic language rooted in overlooked histories, archival research, and the politics of material, architecture, and colour; her work reveals how systems of power are built, maintained, and resisted.

By placing historical narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, her work invites us to see existing structures from multiple perspectives – and to imagine different ways of navigating the future.

Kapwani joined us at Callie’s this spring, having recently relocated to Berlin from Paris. While in residency, she worked on solo exhibitions for the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Fundació Joan Miro in Barcelona – her first major retrospective in Spain.

📸 3: Kapwani Kiwanga, image by Angela Scamarcio

Luke van Gelderen was raised on the internet, in the crevices between emo-teen Tumblr and the web’s darker, more unregulated corners.

Now based between Berlin and Dublin, Luke works across film, sculpture, installation, and image-making. Drawing on found footage, social media clips, and livestreams, his practice explores online culture and the forms of selfhood it produces. Rather than approaching online subcultures from a position of alienation, Luke pulls from his own experiences to examine how digital spaces shape emotion and identity.

During his residency at Callie’s this spring, Luke developed his latest film, CRISIS ACTOR, alongside a new series of transfer prints. Composed of appropriated online footage and original sequences, the film traces a shift from the vulnerable self-expression of early internet subcultures to today’s algorithm-driven platforms, where emotion is increasingly performed and commodified. Moving between footage of the Los Angeles wildfires, influencer confessionals, and news clips, the film blurs the boundaries between intimacy and spectacle, and between personal and collective crisis, reflecting on the direct link between emotion and authenticity online.

The accompanying prints isolate figures whose online identities have become inseparable from public crisis or collapse—from Justin Bieber to Clavicular—removing them from the endless flow of the feed and inviting a closer look at the fragility of internet fame.

Congratulations to Mire Lee on the opening of her solo exhibition, “The Heart of My Machine is Golden Lead,” at Secession in Vienna.

Over the past months, Mire has been developing the exhibition at Callie’s – prototyping and developing new materials and refining concepts.

Reflecting on lead as both a historical material and a metaphor, the exhibition continues Mire’s exploration of the shifting relationship between the organic and the industrial and transforming ideas on toxicity, desire, and decay.

At its center, a rotating cement mixer churns a dense red liquid that spills down a slanted metal wall. From the moment the work is activated, a process of aging begins: materials oxidize, coagulate, rust, and scab over themselves, slowly transforming the installation over the course of the exhibition.

“The Heart of My Machine is Golden Lead” is on view at Secession through the end of August 2026.

📸 1, 2: Mire Lee, The Heart of My Machine is Golden Lead, installation view, Secession 2026. Photo: Iris Ranzinger
📸: 3: Mire Lee’s studio at Callie’s

Thank you to everyone who joined us last week as writer-in-residence Dakotah Weeks Murphree read from her debut novel in progress, Teacher Fantasy. 📚

Through a selection of excerpts, Dakotah introduced the novel’s three central characters, loosely inspired by Sylvia Bataille, Georges Bataille, and Jacques Lacan, and the underlying dynamics of desire, power, and agency.

The reading was followed by a conversation with artist Kat Schneider, which explored gendered archetypes, psychoanalysis, and Dakotah’s writing process. We especially appreciated the way theoretical questions intertwined with personal anecdotes, offering an intimate glimpse into the ideas and experiences that shape the novel.

Thank you again to everyone who joined us, and to Dakotah and Kat for such a generous and engaging conversation. 🎀

Based in Los Angeles, Cielo Saucedo is interested in migration: of people, ideas, and the infrastructures that shape and govern those movements. Working under the spectre of ableism and built against the apparatus of the surveillance state, Cielo’s practice spans writing, installation, machine vision, video game engines, and sculpture.

At Callie’s, Cielo has been developing a constellation of new works and continuing to research technologies of surveillance and control. She has focused on the American Southwest––how cultural iconography and military technologies from this region have been exported, circulated, and repurposed elsewhere.

Cielo’s research is coalescing into a video that follows a Berlin-based village dedicated to reenactments of the American West facing replacement by a data center––ironic, given how dramatically data centers are reshaping the landscape in Texas itself. Combining 3D animation, live footage, and essayistic commentary, the work traces afterlives of frontier mythologies and the systems they help produce.

Cielo will present a public lecture about their research at Trust in Berlin on Friday, June 19th. Admission is free.