Charmaine Poh: Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take

Deutsche Bank has named Charmaine Poh its “Artist of the Year” for 2025. To mark the occasion, the PalaisPopulaire in Berlin is presenting the first institutional solo exhibition of the Singaporean-Chinese artist and filmmaker, born in 1990.

Poh, who lives in Berlin and Singapore, works with video, installation, and performance. Her multimedia narratives center on identity and power structures, feminism, and queerness in Southeast Asia. In her work, multiple perspectives and perceptions—past and future—overlap like a flowing stream of consciousness.

In Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take, she also investigates time travel, ecology, responsible conduct, and resistance. The landscapes in her films reflect the intertwined facets of Singapore: from the financial district, symbolizing global trade, to the mangrove forests on the city’s fringes, threatened by the metropolis’s ever-growing demand for water and land reclamation.

Water is omnipresent in Poh’s work. It represents life, fluidity, a soft but persistent energy. Her video installation The Moon is Wet (2025) tells the story of the “majie”—migrant, unmarried domestic workers who have worked as cooks and nannies in Singapore since the 1930s. They formed their own communities of alternative kinships. Singapore’s economic rise is as closely linked to its waterfront location as it is to the migration of laborers. Poh gives voice to their forgotten stories and marginalized lives in her three-channel video installation. She interweaves the monologues of a fictional majie and a present-day domestic worker with the myth of the sea goddess Mazu, a protective deity for the Hokkien-speaking population of Southeast Asia, creating a discourse on solidarity and collective action.

For Poh, care also means caring for the planet. Her film What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world, which premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2024, is dedicated to tender, vulnerable moments. Voices, sounds, and images blend together: stories from queer couples about their feelings during childbirth, the first moments in the delivery room, breastfeeding. These intimate glimpses into non-heteronormative families in Singapore are intercut with images of trees, forest floors, and skies—nature scenes and microscopic worlds inhabited by insects and tiny organisms. The film explores love, the fears of LGBTQ+ parents, egg freezing, artificial insemination, and the decision to start a family in Singapore despite legal obstacles and social rejection—an act of resistance. Poh advocates for the protection of endangered ecosystems, animals, and plants, as well as for the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community. Her work also addresses the blurred boundaries between the “natural” and the “artificial.” Much like ecology itself, Poh calls for empathy in the use of new technologies and in the digital realm.

In films such as public solitude (2022) and GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY (2021-23), she processes her traumatic experiences as a child television star in Singapore in the 1990s. Using AI and archival footage, she creates a deepfake avatar of her younger self—a response to the sexualization of her child’s body and the media attention it received. This avatar becomes a medium for media critique and cyberfeminist activism. As in all her work, Poh’s focus is on selfempowerment in a world where the lines between reality and virtuality are increasingly dissolving.

Since 2010, Deutsche Bank has honored one artist each year, providing a platform for new positions in contemporary art. Charmaine Poh was nominated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Director of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, and selected as “Artist of the Year” by the curatorial art team of the bank.

Curator: Britta Färber, Global Head of Art & Culture, Deutsche Bank