Two Roses and a Briar Pipe

Join us over Chicago Exhibition Weekend for the opening of 'Two Roses and a Briar Pipe,' a group exhibition of five established and emerging artists based in Berlin, Vienna, and Chicago.

Titled after an ominous still-life painting in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film DESPAIR, this exhibition brings together sculpture, installation, and photography that play with the staging and performance of national and social identities. Using artifice and routine, these works suggest a shared sense of psychological and political fragmentation.

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 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), Ambach and Rice (Los Angeles), 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, based in Berlin) studied at the Glasgow School of Art and at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Keil works in diverse mediums, including installation, painting, and film, and her practice is shaped by a performative engagement with questions of identity and authenticity. Found jpegs become the subject of spurious ‘self’ portraits; multiple voices, found and filmed recordings are spliced in sound and video installations – there is no easy division between the digital and the analogue self. 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, based 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, based 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, based 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.