Two Roses and a Briar Pipe

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 film DESPAIR, a chocolate manufacturer named Hermann Hermann slowly goes mad against the backdrop of Weimar Germany’s descent into fascism. As his wife drifts in and out of the narrative with her artist lover Ardalion, Hermann concocts a doppelganger scheme in order to stage his own murder.

The title of this exhibition is taken from a nondescript still life painting that Hermann glimpses in the artist’s studio of two rosebuds and a tobacco pipe. On the back of the canvas someone has drawn a crude swastika. The artist claims offhandedly that it was drawn by his neighbor’s son, and only Hermann reacts in rational alarm. Filming both political and psychological fragmentation with characteristic detachment, Fassbinder blurs the boundaries between sanity and delusion to reveal the two faces of social life - one floral, labored, and mundane, the other scrawled and violent.

Taking its cue from the dual qualities of this painting, this exhibition brings together works by five established and emerging artists active in Berlin, Vienna, and Chicago whose work conveys a shared sense of alienation and political inefficacy. As isolationist and illiberal tendencies increasingly dominate the relationship between the U.S. and Europe, the artists in this exhibition focus on more subtle, individual senses of division and disassociation. In prop-like sculptures and installations, these works play with the staging and performance of national and social identities. Drawing on architectural history, social media, and banality and routine as both subjects and source material, these works suggest a quiet sense of futility and rupture.

This exhibition is presented by Scherben, Co-Prosperity, and the Goethe-Institut Chicago, and is co-curated by Tarik Kentouche, Lorenz Liebig, and Leah Gallant. It will open in Scherben’s Berlin space in spring 2026.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

John Neff
John Neff (b. 1975 Indianapolis, IN; lives and works in Chicago) is a curator, artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His long-standing artistic practice frequently utilizes photographic techniques, with himself and his social environment often being the subject of his imagery. He is a co-founder of the Iceberg Projects space in Chicago and has had solo exhibitions at the Renaissance Society (Chicago), Regards Gallery (Chicago) and Scherben (Berlin). His work is in the collection of the LACMA (Los Angeles).

Morag Keil
Morag Keil (b. 1985, Edinburgh, Scotland; lives and works in London) studied at the Glasgow School of Art and at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Keil works primarily with installations combining video, painting, and sculpture, all used with a sense of urgency. These hybrid forms evoke the bleak efficiency of a contemporary life shaped by digital platforms. Her practice examines themes of stuckness, repetition, and fractured agency,  reflecting on the conditions that construct our subjectivities within a brand-driven culture. ‘Meaning’ is deliberately unstable, leaning into cliché while resisting clear interpretation. Morag Keil’s solo exhibitions include ‘Potpourri’, Cubitt, London; ‘Palais de Token’, Neue Alte Bruecke, Frankfurt (2013); ‘Civil War’, Outpost, Norwich (2012); ‘Virginia Ham’, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; ‘Moarg Kiel’, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; ‘Public Hanging’, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (all 2011). In 2010, Keil received the Prix Lafayette at FIAC in Paris. 

Connor Crawford 
Connor Crawford (b. 1992 Ontario, Canada; lives and works in Vienna) is a multidisciplinary artist who currently lives and works in Vienna. His work often employs themes of humour and cliché in order to explore broad concepts. He has recently exhibited at Shore Gallery (Vienna), Kunstraum Schwaz (Schwaz) and Scherben (Berlin).

Adrian Piper
Adrian Piper (b. 1948, NYC; lives and works in Berlin) is an acclaimed conceptual artist and Kantian philosopher. Working across performance, video installation, photography, drawing, and text, Piper invites viewers to confront their own limitations surrounding race, gender, and historical experience. Her numerous awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 2015 Venice Biennale. In 2018, MoMA staged the exhibition “Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016,” a 50-year retrospective of her work.

Jasia Rabiej
Jasia Rabiej (b. 2000 Gdansk, Poland; lives and works in Berlin and Warsaw) is an artist and musician whose work explores themes of nostalgia, memory and the transience of the digital world. By combining found images from abandoned blogs and photographs from herself, found places or others, she creates dreamy, ethereal collages with painterly aspects. Her work has been shown in Little (Bern), Brouwersgracht (Amsterdam), and Scherben (Berlin) among others. She released her debut album entitled "Enter My House" in 2021 under the pseudonym Jśa on the Shanghai-based label Genome 6.66 bpm.