Global Fascisms, Haus der Kulturen der WeltThe international art centre in Berlin, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) describes itself as an institution that “proposes concepts of the world that embrace pluralities of cultures, epistemologies and sociopolitics.” Good news, in a time when humanity itself feels under siege – questioned, put to the test, and negated around the world.

Within this rubric, the exhibition Global Fascisms sets out to tackle a vast and elusive subject. Rather than offer any didactic or explanatory guidance, the show presents a plurality of artworks, leaving them to carry the weight of the exhibition title. Maybe it is in this “flattening” of humanity, of artists as vocalists for political issues, where this exhibition titillates, but falls short. In Germany today, the topic of incipient fascism is an urgent one, but by leaving the intellectual groundwork to the curators and catalogues, it misses the threads that would tie the works to the ideologies it looks to expose and discuss.

The graphics and poster for Global Fascisms promise revelation; the exhibition, instead, suggests how difficult revelation is to stage. The experience lingers less as a coherent argument than as flashes of brilliance – Martin Kippenberger, Josh Kline – that might stand anywhere, in any time. Global Fascisms attempts, perhaps too much, to ask art to bear the impossible burden of explanation. Its power lies in its ambition; its shortcoming, in leaving us to map that ambition ourselves.

Magic Bullet, Issy Wood, Schinkel PavilionAmerican-born British artist Issy Wood responded to the atmospheric architecture of the Schinkel Pavillion with her solo exhibition Magic Bullet. Wood has been active on the international scene as a musician, blogger and artist, and her work explores the forms of mediation familiar to those who came of age online. Depressive, uncanny paintings of piggy banks, Diet Coke cans, and car interiors describe the anomie and perverse pleasures of hypermodern living, yet their framing is allegorical, not aggrandising. Everyday objects are transformed into symbols of emotional and cultural unease.

Wood made full use of the Pavillion space, including main rooms, tiled toilets and utility back rooms, and an upstairs “show” room arranged with a full band setup, its instruments painted with dice. The sense of absence in both the paintings and the empty but decorative performance room indicates that, of course, anything can be made into an image.

Wood’s skill lies in the ability to project and empathise details of cuteness, feminine tropes and lack of self to another visual level. Not to capitulate capitalism, but to comment on imagery itself. Her poetic books, and lyrics like “Orange Wine” reiterate her love of the medium, while putting herself, bodily, and live, in the centre of the work.

Dead God Flow, Christelle Oyiri, CANKParis-based artist Christelle Oyiri presented her audio-visual installation Dead God Flow (2025) with the LAS Art Foundation at CANK, an exhibition space in Neukölln that once housed a Brutalist shopping centre. At the core of the installation is Hauntology of an OG (2025), a video work developed in collaboration with photographer Neva Wireko and narrated by rapper Darius Phatmak Clayton, exploring the cultural, historical, and mythological landscape of Memphis, Tennessee.

Given that Oyiri’s work often considers alienation, alternative temporalities, and the visual vernacular of youth and African diaspora cultures, Memphis is an appropriate place of inquiry. The city has a storied history in American culture that goes beyond its rock ’n’ roll heritage: it was at the city’s Mason Temple that Martin Luther King gave his final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”; he was assassinated just a day later. Oyiri also traces the city’s ties to ancient Egypt, embodied by the Memphis Pyramid, a two-thirds replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza that sits on the banks of the Mississippi River. Within this landscape, Hauntology of an OG considers Memphis rap, pioneered by figures like DJ Spanish Fly and Three 6 Mafia, as a sonic architecture that reflects cycles of death and cultural memory.

Oyiri is renowned in the electronic underground under her DJ alias Crystalmess, and the exhibition space was transformed into a club-like scene, complete with a pyramid-shaped seating area. Atmospheric and alarming, Oyiri’s work reveals how histories of oppression and migration are both lived and imagined, and what alternatives the future could hold. .