#164: Daniel Hopp

Friday, 13 November 2026, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
admission free and open to the public

Daniel Hopp is an artist and filmmaker whose practice moves between film, video installation and performance. His works often emerge from close collaborations with friends, actors, family members and people he encounters in specific social contexts. Rather than working with fixed scripts, Hopp creates situations in which participants perform versions of themselves, moving between role, biography, fiction and lived experience.

A recurring concern in his work is the relationship between staging and reality: the moment in which a performed situation begins to produce actual relationships, vulnerabilities and consequences. His films engage with intimacy, class, addiction, social marginalisation, violence and care, while repeatedly raising questions about who is looking at whom, who is speaking for whom, and how authorship is distributed within an artistic process.

Working with moving image, performance and spatial installation, Hopp develops filmic situations that remain deliberately open and process-based. The proximity between the camera and the protagonists is central to his practice. Rather than attempting to uncover an allegedly authentic reality behind performance, his work uses artistic interventions to temporarily alter existing situations. These interventions can be understood as temporary prostheses: constructions that shift particular conditions and enable different forms of action. At the centre of this approach is the question of whether such artistic interventions can become effective not only within the work itself, but also have an impact on the actual living conditions of those involved.

Daniel Hopp. who is present, shows:

Die Geschichte der Bärchen, 2014, 5:18 min
Somewhere in between a family album, life confession and Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, we discover the world of the little bears. At the same time in Die Geschichte der Bärchen, one can’t shake the feeling that the bears in Hopp’s works are closely related to assholes, perhaps familiarly – but at least structurally. — Lukas Ludwig

If there is love, you will take it, 2020, 10:45 min
If there is love, you will take it encompasses the overlappings of cinematic and everyday life constructions of reality and fiction. “Play the gangster you’d like to be” is the task the protagonists, self-proclaimed “tough boys” and the artist and director himself, take up in a cultural center and inoffical gambling spot in a red light district. What does a gangster talk like? References from oldschool gangster-films are implemented into the protagonists’ speech, and reverberate back to the speakers through the mechanical mouths of the cute stuffed talking animals sitting on the table. Questions of identity, subjectivity, role and hierarchy (both that of the art work and the artist) are a recurring theme of Daniel Hopp’s artistic practice. He works with friends, neighbours, colleagues, aquaintances from different social milieus, creating a topology of social roles and positions to locate his own position as artist. — Charlotte Klink

Daggi, 2026, 22:02 min
Together with his neighbor Daggi (Dagmar Melón) — who moved to West Berlin on the final day of the GDR to work as a private detective — the artist Daniel Hopp embarks on an inquiry that begins with the real-life death of his former tenant. What initially takes the form of a documentary investigation gradually shifts into a mode of self-reflection, staging, and reenactment.

Daggi contributes not only her keen powers of observation but also a biography shaped by political ruptures, existential uncertainty, and an ambivalent practice of caregiving. As Hopp’s artistic research becomes increasingly intertwined with Daggi’s subjective perspective, a dense constellation emerges — one that is further mirrored and questioned through the introduction of an actor (Marten-Quirin Korte) who performs the role of Hopp.

The film unfolds as a discursive space situated between documentary gesture and performative reflection. Here, identity does not appear as something given, but as a fragile construct produced through media-based processes such as reenactment, camera work, and role-play. Through the layering of autobiographical material, staged configurations, and detective-like curiosity, the work opens an inquiry into what has been repressed — without claiming any definitive resolution. — Ania Kolyszko

Dark Spots, 2022, 14:42 min
In Dark Spots, the line between performance and reality is blurred into nauseating ambiguity. Mother and Son are joined in the home by an unspoken weight, documentary slips into horror, becoming increasingly personal and ushering in a recognizable sense of banal family dread. The situation inevitably unravels, spiraling around regret, resentment, and acceptance, all against the persisting uncertainty despair of unanswered questions, and unfulfilled possibilities. — Adam Grainger

The Producer, 2026, 12:13 min (raw cut)
Conceived as the final chapter of Fictional Healing, The Producer emerges from Daniel Hopp’s ongoing artistic engagement with people affected by addiction and social marginalisation. Places of transit, such as train stations and public squares, particularly Leopoldplatz in Berlin and the area surrounding the Drob Inn near Hamburg Central Station, form the social context of this work. Here, addiction, homelessness and strategies for survival intersect with urban mobility, art and culture.

In The Producer, a young woman (Lois Zoboky) plays a prostitute. Caught between the gaze of others, sexual encounters and the staging of her own self, she develops an intimate relationship with a steel figure. She envies it for something that is gradually slipping away from her: the possibility of simply being an object without desire or responsibility. As fetish, art and addiction blur together, she becomes increasingly entangled in the expectations and projections of others.

Drawing on his own experiences with addiction, drug-related crime and their consequences, Hopp challenges stigmatizing narratives and questions the socially constructed divide between the elevated and the rejected, between the sanctioned spaces of art and lives relegated to the margins. Rather than attempting to reconcile these worlds, his practice allows artistic expression to emerge from their entanglement.

As the concluding chapter of Fictional Healing (produced by ania maria wanda, shown in Kunsthaus Hamburg), a collaborative film project in which personal histories, dreams and fantasies are transformed into fictional scenes, The Producer turns the question of representation towards the relationship between subject and object. The film explores how identity is shaped by the desires and projections of others, and what happens when the possibility of becoming an object begins to appear as a form of liberation. In doing so, it continues to question who has the right to represent whom, and under what conditions those represented can participate in shaping their own narratives.

The Producer is produced by SCHEINFIRMA an initiative by Arius, Johannes Büttner, Christoph Carsten, Antje Engelmann, Daniel Hopp, Charlotte Klink and Moritz Zangerl. SCHEINFIRMA operates in the fractures of the labour market, bringing together artists, philosophers and people navigating precarious work, social services and unemployment. Without a fixed identity or structure, it borrows and redirects existing infrastructures, resources and roles to create new forms of collective artistic production. SCHEINFIRMA’s official launch will take place at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin in January 2027.

Daniel Hopp studied Fine Arts at HFBK Hamburg and ABK Stuttgart from 2013. From 2015 to 2021, he was a scholarship holder of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. In 2017, he received the Hiscox Art Award. In 2019, he was awarded an international scholarship by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation to study at the Royal College of Art in London, where he completed his Master’s degree in 2021. In 2022, he received the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship.

His work has been shown in numerous national and international contexts, including Kunsthaus Hamburg, Solitude Project Space at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Kunstverein Schwerin; Kunstverein Jesteburg; Videonale Parcours, Bonn; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Brücke-Museum, Berlin; Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin; Mattflix at Matt’s Gallery, London; and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.