As a special feature of this 10th edition, Forecast mentees will share their projects at events and pop-up exhibitions hosted with partner institutions across Berlin. The kick-off event of this series takes place on December 4 at Gropius Bau, as part of their Spätschicht program.
Bethan Hughes will share an open-studio presentation centered on fragments of her work-in-progress, Shadowing (working title), together with her mentor, artist James Richards. Departing from media representations of the Neukölln housing estate where she lives, the work theatrically stages the tension between architectural reality and social projection. Conceived as an audiovisual shadow play, it merges archival research, spatial sound, video, found footage, and remade architectural features. Through a performative choreography of sound, image, sculpture and light, Hughes questions how imagination, fantasy, desire, surveillance, discipline and violence intersect in constructed image worlds.
Hussein Chalayan and his Forecast mentee, Kihako Narisawa, will host a screening of Chalayan’s 2004 film Anaesthetics — commissioned by Moderna Museet (Sweden) and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa, Japan) — and Narisawa’s work layer(s). Chalayan’s film examines institutional frameworks that foster social anaesthetization from a modern anthropological perspective. The screening will be followed by a discussion moderated by Lukas Feireiss, jointly presented with HTW Berlin. Screening starts at 19:30.
Throughout the evening, Japanese choreographer and performing artist Kihako Narisawa will inhabit the museum’s interstitial spaces for an evening of open-form performance. The museum’s frames a shifting flow of presence and pause: 20-minute fragments of a durational performance by Kihako Narisawa appear in intervals. The evening forms a continuous, shared event, where film, dialogue, and live interventions coexist in overlapping temporal layers. As both artists engage with the shared concept of “Reclaiming the Self,” Narisawa’s performance traces the layering of identity, visibility, and representation. She explores how identity is curated, performed, and perceived—where presence, perception, and cultural as well as intersectional codes shape what we recognize as diversity. The work examines the protective armor individuals adopt to express or shield their identities, and how projection, etiquette, and cultural expectation construct meaning around a body in performance.
Spätschicht x Leila Hekmat
with FORECAST: Bethan Hughes, James Richards, Kihako Narisawa, Hussein Chalayan, and Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin
Dezember, 4 2025, from 7pm (Screening at 7:30 Uhr)
Free admission