#155: Christin Berg

Friday, 19 December 2025, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
admission free and open to the public

Christin Berg develops her films through an engagement with space. Industrial sites, buildings awaiting demolition, wildfire zones, or a samurai film studio become resonant environments where movement, character, and narrative evolve organically – in collaboration with a shifting ensemble of artists and performers. Her films emerge from process, from observing and transforming the world through the act of making. Since the beginning of her practice, Berg has been drawn to utopian ideas – to the state of the never fully attainable – as a driving tension that fuels movement, doubt, and imagination. Trained as a stage designer, she explores how space can be transformed through artistic presence and imagination.

Her longtime editor Ninon Liotet once described Berg’s films in IT’S TIME as “something you can almost smell – mud, fire, burnt wood” – capturing their tactile, physical quality. In her ongoing creative exchange with E-WERK, where she maintains a studio, Berg expands her practice through a regenerative, sustainability-oriented approach that intertwines artistic research with the global entanglement of nature, technology, and contemporary cultural production.

Christin Berg who is present will show:

Hamster, Erste Hilfe, 2022, HD Video,2:36 min
Alongside her more elaborate film projects, Berg also creates experimental music videos — including one for the post-punk duo Erste Hilfe from Berlin, Germany. The collaboration accompanied the band’s debut release, which came out on August 12, 2022 on U-Bac (Leipzig, Germany). For their track Hamster — a sharp reflection on the endless wheel we all keep running in — Berg shaped a visual language that translates the song’s ironic, dystopian energy into images. Shot in her own apartment and in a car wash, the piece emerged as a raw, immediate intervention: direct, collaborative, and experimental. 

Where the Light Falls, 2025, HD Video,10:00 min
Since 2020, Where the LIght Falls has grown from Christin Berg’s ongoing research into light as both a technical and narrative force — in theatre, on film sets, and in photography, where exposure becomes a method of constructing meaning.
At its center is Emi Ogura, playing a lighting technician on set. Her world is defined by artificial light — spotlights, rigs, the controlled glow she builds for the camera. Yet her mind drifts back to the natural light of her childhood home, to memories formed by daylight rather than instruments.
Set in Japan’s oldest continuously operating film studio, founded in 1926, Where the Light Falls moves between three key locations: a 250-year-old samurai house lit only by fire and shōji-filtered light; a traditional samurai film studio where these spaces are recreated as sets; and the sunlit grounds of the Kyoto Botanical Garden. Real and fabricated spaces echo each other, sometimes clashing, sometimes resonating.
Supported by Goethe Institut, Villa Kamogawa, Kyoto, Toei Studios Kyoto, Kyoto Botanical Garden

Un Pas Devant, 2024, HD Video,  24:25 min
The project began in Paris in 2020, where the figure of the flâneuse became central to Berg’s research. Silent protest — walking alone as a woman through public space — formed part of an evolving inquiry shaped by the legacy of internationalist thinkers and the many authors of artistic manifestos born in this city. Walking became both a gesture of resistance and a simple assertion that public space belongs to those who traverse it.
In 2020, the unusual quiet brought on by the early pandemic added another layer: a city in a state of suspension. Flânerie turned inward, at times almost claustrophobic, sometimes remaining deliberately unnoticed.
Shot in black and white, the film creates a sense of stillness and concentration, evoking the photographic history of Paris while sharpening its critical gaze. It presents Berg also as an observer of social space — attentive to absence, tension, and the politics of simply walking.
Supported by Hessische Kulturstiftung, Cité Internationale des Arts

Fire Walks with Me (1-channel version), 2023, HD Video,10:00 min
Fire Walks With Me traces a group of characters moving through sharply contrasting European landscapes shaped by climate and terrain. Filmed along the Portuguese coast south of Lisbon, in the forests of Fontainebleau near Paris, on the sub-arctic shores of Skagaströnd in Iceland, and in the flat, water-rich region of Mecklenburg in Germany, the work marks the first international chapter of the Fire on Air series.
At the center stands a woman on a continual journey—crossing wind-beaten cliffs, dense forests, volcanic plains, and quiet rural fields. Her path reflects one of the film’s core questions: how closely are we still connected to the natural world, and how far have the structures of urban and industrial life taken us from it?
Originally conceived as a three-channel installation, the work has been adapted into a dedicated single-channel version for the cinema screen. In this form, the film continues to rely on strong visual contrasts—between climates, textures, and elemental forces—to let differences in light, movement, and atmosphere reach the audience directly. It underscores that cinema lives through contrast: earth against water, wind against stone, human presence against the vastness of landscape.
Fire Walks With Me invites viewers to consider these shifts not as metaphors, but as material realities that shape how we move, perceive, and relate to the world around us.
Supported by NES Artist Residency, Hessische Kulturstiftung, Kulturförderung Mecklenburg Vorpommern, European Cultural Foundation

Beyond The Now, 2022, HD Video,  18:47 min
Rooted in Romantic motifs of longing, sensitivity, and quiet connection, Beyond the Now opens with a calm, attentive gaze. Filmed in the landscape around Olevano Romano and in the bar of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, it traces a movement from nature into human presence.
For the outdoor scenes, projection surfaces were installed directly in the forest, some suspended and entwined with thorny branches from above, allowing the images to merge physically with their surroundings. At dawn, the camera drifts toward a sparse treetop as pulsing woodwinds rise. A screen appears, showing black-and-white fragments of bodies—gestures returning like distant memories.
The film then shifts to the Akademie: a child running through a room, a woman rising slowly behind a bar, two women carefully exploring each other’s touch, and another recounting a dream that echoes the opening.
In this interplay of nature and urban interiors, Beyond the Now reflects solitude and uncertainty while suggesting small, resilient forms of connection—glimpses of how our relationship to the world might continue to evolve.
Supported by Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Villa Massimo, Rom, Villa Serpentara, Olevano Romano

Christin Berg (b. 1982, Berlin) is a visual artist and filmmaker based between Berlin and Paris. Coming from a background in stage design at theatres such as Thalia Theater Hamburg, Schauspiel Köln, and Volksbühne Berlin, she later shifted her focus to film as a medium for spatial transformation and sensory narration. Berg has held residencies at Villa Kamogawa Kyoto, Cité internationale des Arts Paris, the NES Artist Residency and Skaftfell Art Center in Iceland, and was awarded the Villa Serpentara Fellowship of the Junge Akademie der Künste, supported by the Hessische Kulturstiftung. Her films and installations have been presented at Akademie der Künste Berlin (Pariser Platz), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (Double Feature), Rencontre International Paris/Berlin – including screenings in Paris and at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin – as well as at the Video Art Prize 2024 at Kunsthalle Rostock and Cité internationale des Arts Paris.

In the early 2000s, Berg founded the off-space White Horse in Reykjavík, a temporary laboratory for collective artistic experiments. This spirit of collaboration continues in her platform FIRE ON AIR, which supports collective film and video projects beyond institutional frameworks. Her recent works – including FROM NOW ON SILENCE and BEYOND THE NOW – explore the subtle communication between human, nature, and technology. Precise yet poetic, her films weave together materiality, body, and time to reveal the transformative potential of perception. 

website: www.fireonair.world