Centralia

Bild 1–5: All photos by Julie Becquart
Bild 6: courtesy the artist and Mountains, Berlin. Photo: Julie Becquart

For Berlin Art Week 2026, Mountains is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Nschotschi Haslinger (*1982, Eitorf bei Köln).

Nschotschi Haslinger presents Centralia, a new body of work comprising ceramic floor and wall sculptures, coloured-pencil drawings, video, and performance. At the centre of the exhibition are hybrid bodies and creatures whose long, umbilical cord-like necks, elongated limbs, roots, and tentacular forms blur the boundaries between human, animal, plant, and landscape. They appear as beings in transformation – vulnerable yet alert, inhabiting a world that seems to have emerged into a new state.

Haslinger’s sculptures and drawings unfold a fantastical visual universe in which bodies grow into their surroundings and landscapes take on the qualities of living organisms. Eggs, flowers, trees, subterranean spaces, rays of light, and cosmic formations recur throughout the works, creating an open and constantly transforming ecology. Particularly in the drawings, this world takes on a spiritual and distinctly feminine dimension: bodies are not fixed forms, but sites of metamorphosis, connection, and new possibility.

Rather than depicting catastrophe, Haslinger approaches the fractured and crisis-ridden present through an imagined world beyond it. Her works can be understood as glimpses from a possible future – a future in which humanity has entered a different stage of its existence and in which new forms of relation between body, environment, and other living beings have become possible. Fantasy becomes a means of approaching reality from another direction: not by reproducing the world as it is, but by imagining what might come after it.

The title Centralia refers to the almost abandoned town in Pennsylvania beneath which a coal seam has been burning since the 1960s. The virtually inextinguishable underground fire evokes landscapes permanently transformed by human intervention, as well as an Earth whose subterranean forces escape human control. At the same time, Centralia suggests a centre – a point of concentration where ecological, geological, bodily, and spiritual forces converge.

The exhibition is complemented by a video and a performance featuring a tree-like wearable sculpture, temporarily activated by performers. Together, sculpture, drawing, moving image, and the human body form a shared spatial environment – one that oscillates between the earthly and the cosmic, the familiar and the imagined.

Centralia marks Nschotschi Haslinger’s first comprehensive solo exhibition at Mountains, following her participation in the three-person show Hinter Deinem Schatten / Behind Your Shadow (Martina Kügler, Nschotschi Haslinger, Miriam Cahn) at the gallery in 2024.