At KOW Berlin, Candice Breitz presents Hot Potato, an exhibition that unfolds as a sharp and emotionally charged reflection on cultural power, censorship and the uneasy position of the artist within contemporary Germany.
Through sculpture, installation, text works and performance, Breitz examines the growing tension between artistic freedom and institutional control, tracing how political pressure increasingly shapes the conditions under which culture is produced, funded and displayed. Rather than approaching these questions through direct statement alone, the exhibition operates through appropriation, irony and layered historical references, building a fragmented portrait of a city wrestling with its own contradictions.
Exhibition view: Hot Potato by Candice Breitz at Kow, Berlin, 2026
Berlin itself becomes a central presence throughout the exhibition. Once imagined as a site of openness, experimentation and radical cultural possibility, the city appears here as increasingly burdened by bureaucracy, moral regulation and ideological anxiety. Breitz reflects on this transformation through recurring images of bears, Berlin’s symbolic animal, which move through the exhibition as figures of vulnerability, spectacle and containment.
In one installation, performers occupy the gallery storefront in bear costumes, simultaneously playful and unsettling, turning public space into a stage where visibility and obedience become intertwined. Elsewhere, damaged bronze bear sculptures are displayed inside glass vitrines like wounded relics, suspended between monument and captivity. The works repeatedly return to questions of who is permitted to speak, perform or belong within institutional structures, and under what conditions.
Exhibition view: Hot Potato by Candice Breitz at Kow, Berlin, 2026
Exhibition view: Hot Potato by Candice Breitz at Kow, Berlin, 2026
The exhibition also draws on a wide constellation of artistic references, borrowing gestures, forms and strategies from figures across art, music and political performance. Rather than functioning as homage alone, these appropriations create a conversation across generations of artists who have used culture as a space for resistance, dissent and ethical confrontation.
Colour plays a symbolic role throughout Hot Potato. Shades of brown, red, black and gold appear repeatedly across paintings and installations, invoking both national identity and the unstable relationship between patriotism, memory and power. Breitz transforms these visual codes into uneasy abstractions that blur the boundaries between critique and complicity.
Exhibition view: Hot Potato by Candice Breitz at Kow, Berlin, 2026
Exhibition view: Hot Potato by Candice Breitz at Kow, Berlin, 2026
Alongside the exhibition, a parallel performance programme extends these questions into live space, foregrounding collective voice, solidarity and remembrance. References to antifascist histories and contemporary humanitarian crises position the exhibition not as a detached political commentary, but as an attempt to confront the moral responsibilities embedded within artistic practice itself.
Rather than offering resolution, Hot Potato embraces discomfort and contradiction. The exhibition asks what remains possible for artists working within systems that increasingly demand compliance, and whether art can still function as a space for dissent in moments shaped by fear, surveillance and political pressure.
Exhibition view: Hot Potato by Candice Breitz at Kow, Berlin, 2026
