LOTTIE STEPHENS
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The Quagmire
Text and curation by Lottie Stephens
A quagmire is defined as a soft boggy area of land that gives way underfoot. Similar to a swamp or bog, its key characteristic lies in the difficulty of navigating its terrain, due to an excess of water. The word originates from 17th-century Old English: quag, meaning bog or marsh, and mire, meaning wet ground.
In this group exhibition, the artists have imagined this attic space as both a physical site - marked by time, decay, and growth - as well as a metaphor for the politically uneasy, unstable times. “The Quagmire” is a space to express inner thoughts, to think through making, and allow ideas to come to the surface.
When the curator, Lottie Stephens, first moved to Berlin, she was told “Berlin is a swamp”. A melting pot of peculiar and intriguing characters and ideas: bubbling and boiling, stinking and ever-changing -
regenerating , sinking and metamorphosing. Berlin is famously a city built in a glacial valley, formerly a marshy and swampy lowland - the Slavic word “berl” also meaning swamp. Across the city, striking pink pipes protrude over the city’s streets, part of the infrastructure designed to prevent water overflow. Structures meant to stop the city from flooding glimmer everywhere, if you look carefully enough.
Staging the exhibition in this attic felt instinctive. Several of the participating artists have studios in the same building, as members of Culterim Studios. This attic is part of the former Herzbergstraße workers’ housing from the DDR era and stands in direct contrast to the conventional white cube gallery space.
The works in this exhibition are not bound by a single aesthetic but instead a shared artistic trust in materiality, intuition and transformation. Many artists have returned to the elements of clay, mud, ash, film, all materials that hold memory and resist control. Through slower, tactile processes, they explore themes of place, dwelling, decay, and regeneration. Some investigate the land directly; others treat the body or built environment as a terrain. Across sculpture, performance, photography, painting, and film, there’s a deep engagement with process; where making becomes a way of thinking, feeling, and resisting the speed of the contemporary age. This exhibition proposes that in unstable times, grounding oneself in matter — in the mess, the cracks, the quagmire — is not a retreat, but a radical act.
In this attic, suspended high above Berlin’s swampy ground, the artists have gathered to not find solid footing, but embrace the quagmire - a constantly shifting space where new forms can take root.
