“Psychonauts” at Berlinische Galerie

Who are we and what are we doing here? Ever since Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) founded psychoanalysis, we have been searching our own souls for answers to life’s great questions.

Psychonaut comes from astronaut and literally means soul-sailor. These voyages lead not out into space but towards the infinite expanse within us. In that spirit artists John Bock (*1965) and Heiner Franzen (*1961) explore the human psyche and its depths in their videos. They draw inspiration from the cinema with its rivers of imagery, a machinery of dream and myth often compared with the human mind.

The installations “Cowwidnok”, 2015, by Bock and “Twin”, 2009, by Franzen are both in the collection of the Berlinische Galerie and are on dis- play in the museum for the first time.

John Bock, Cowwidinok, 2015
John Bock’s films experiment with a variety of genres. The artist’s film-based works always transport us into a dream-like or nightmarish parallel universe. Bock shot the fictional “Cowwidinok” during his exhibition “Im Modder der Summenmutation” in Bonn in 2013/14. The actors perform on different stages each representing a different genre, such as theatre of the absurd, soap opera, fairy tale, thriller and folk play.

The installation includes a large box with a peephole and a projector showing the action in the box: an absurd, doll-sized theatre of the world.
A camera in the middle moves in a circle filming stages open towards the inside.

Heiner Franzen, Twin, 2009
Drawings and videos by Heiner Franzen play with our imagination. For the two video installations exhibited here he draws on footage from James Cameron’s “Terminator II” (1991) and Stanley Kubrick’s “Shining” (1980). Franzen extracts short sequences from the broader cinematic context and breaks them down into frames. The images are processed, alienated and finally rearranged. A detail thus becomes the seed for a new film, puzzling and emotionally unsettling. Franzen’s works function like an echo chamber of memory. We experience the reverberations in an entirely new way. Things look familiar, but we have never seen them before.

at Berlinische Galerie
until August 11, 2025