Coumba Samba, Gordon Baldwin, and Hanne Darboven’s House

Coumba Samba: deutschland
Coumba Samba’s exhibition deutschland for the Kunstverein in Hamburg negotiates the intricate relationship between structure, form, and colour as constituents of coded systems of global infrastructure. Monochromatic containers, stacked throughout the gallery, evoke the visual language of international supply chains, while strobe lights that lend the space a sense of rhythm mark pathways on the floor. The containers rest at different degrees of ease. Their rigid geometries recall the compositions of early 20th-century abstract geometric paintings. Samba’s installation, however, diverges from this art-historical precedent by lending the monochromes a sense of coded meaning and cultural resonance, transforming deutschland into an opaque system whose logic remains elusive, like a glitching interface that never fully resolves.

deutschland builds on Samba’s exhibition Red Gas (2024) at Arcadia Missa, London, in which painted radiators become the endpoint and signifier of the Russian gas industry’s entanglement with the African and European continents. Here, the containers evoke a similar tension between the static and material residue amidst globalisation’s sleepless flow. As ubiquitous symbols of global trade –now central to debates around U.S. tariff wars—they also interrogate the uneasy relationship between free trade agreements and sovereignty, which international supply chains willingly or unwillingly transform. In this context, the colours, chosen to resonate with both cultural and emotional connotations, become a language through which Samba dissects a world dominated by networks of capital.

The directional, strobe lights echo the architecture of the stateless hub—guiding the flow of goods, data and people. Viewers navigating the exhibition become participants in this ecology, moving through the space as though traversing a port or a terminal at night—zones that are both material and conceptual, and where the logic of borders is increasingly porous. This interplay—between the mechanical and the affective, between a sense of direction and being without coordinates – reveals how infrastructure, often unseen, comes to reflect and define human experience within vast, impersonal frameworks.

As this matrix of endpoints, remote nodes and opaque ideology strains under its own logic and latently begins to warp, geometries of power and place scramble. Where deutschland began as a metaphor for a sense of locale within a larger network of flows, it becomes a disorientingly intimate experience of globalisation’s distorting abstraction, as a system of navigation adrift, eroding the sense of geography that conjured it.

deutschland is curated by Milan Ther.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Lumiar Cité, Lisbon, and is kindly supported by the Zeit Stiftung Bucerius, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Francesco Francica and Silvia Valentini, and Arcadia Missa Gallery.

Gordon Baldwin: Inscape
Gordon Baldwin (b. 1932 in Lincoln, England) is a pivotal figure in the history of British modernism and his pioneering use of organic forms, their captivating asymmetry and textured surfaces redefined the potential of clay as a medium. Gordon Baldwin: Inscape captures his life’s work by connecting five decades of his sculptural practice to his poetry and drawings. 

In Baldwin’s exploration of the vessel, as both a form and a negative space, his poetry resonates with a profound awareness of embodiment and relationality. The vessel, as structure and metaphor, delineates an inner space with a sense of place and shelter, but also an absence, an openness, and the void that shapes its form. This duality is mirrored in Baldwin’s interpretation of the world: simultaneously vivid and elusive, “felt” yet uncertain. His language carries the weight of inhabiting spaces that both reveal and obscure meaning, much like the vessel as a membrane between in- and outside. 

In Baldwin’s poetics, the vessel draws upon “the inscape,” a term coined by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, where the essence of a thing or being is not fixed but perceived in its inner dynamic: pulsing, shifting, tangled and tethered at different intensities to its surroundings. In Baldwin’s work, the self is adrift as a point of encounter between interiority and a vast, shifting landscape, oscillating between grounding and disorientation, between inhabiting and being exposed to the world. The vessel is the body of the permeable boundary between the meeting of this internal and external reality, inviting reflection upon how to sense and articulate the self in relation to others, to space, and to the unknowable. 

Inscape is curated by Milan Ther.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Fondazione Officine Saffi, Milan, and is kindly supported by Grundig, with additional thanks to Corvi-Mora, London.

Hanne Darboven’s House
Symposium

The Kunstverein in Hamburg is delighted to announce Hanne Darboven’s House, a symposium dedicated to the life and work of Hanne Darboven, held at her former home in Harburg (Am Burgberg 26-28, 
21079 Hamburg). This symposium marks the launch of a new collaboration between the Kunstverein and the Hanne Darboven Foundation. Beginning in 2026, the Kunstverein will organise exhibitions in the historic Darboven family villa in dialogue with Darboven's legacy. The event will take place on Saturday, June 28, starting at 11 am, followed by a summer party on the premises featuring food and live music beginning at 6 pm.

Participants: Kirsty Bell, Esther Dörring, Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Sam Lewitt, and Sung Tieu

Events
Screening: Southward with Prince Philip (1957) and Atlantiques (2009)
May 28, 6:30–8pm

Clay Radicals: Gordon Baldwin and his circle
June 5, 8–9:30pm, talk by Tanya Harrod

Screening: Ghost Fair Trade (2022)
June 17, 6:30–7:30pm

Symposium: Hanne Darboven’s House 
June 28, 11:00am–6pm

Screening: Das Rotohr (2023) followed by Q&A with Paul Drey
July 8, 6:30–8pm

Screening: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
August 7, 8–10pm