A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads
October 2–18, 2026
Berlin 10243
Germany
HOUSE presents A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads by Ala Roushan and Charles Stankievech at Halle am Berghain, in partnership with Autotelic Foundation.
Curated by Juliet Kothe and Nadim Samman.
A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads unfolds as a ritual. Set within Halle am Berghain, a former power station in Berlin, the exhibition proposes a continuum between archaic beliefs and contemporary energy infrastructures: from worship of the ancient Iranian solar deity, Mithra, to emerging planetary technologies focused on regulating solar energy. At this crossover, the exhibition inhabits an unstable interval, where ritual mutates into technology, scripture becomes script, and the temple dissolves into a simulation—and yet the Sun remains, across thousands of years, an object of devotion and a force we brazenly seek to command.
Stemming from the artists’ fieldwork in Iran, archival research, and experiments in artificial intelligence, Roushan and Stankievech offer an initiation into a suspended dimension of time, where past, present, and future overlap. Documenting the world’s oldest Mithraic cave temple, the exhibition reimagines an undocumented ritual to the solar deity from over four thousand years ago, not as a historical narrative to be reconstructed with certainty, but as a fragmented field of traces—accessed through a speculative constellation of ancient sounds, lost language, unearthed imagery, a climatic event, and the climactic fall of an empire.
Embedded within the ritual is a dark proposition: the desire to control Nature by establishing an intermediary power capable of acting on humanity’s behalf. This desire has not disappeared. It has changed language: the priestess chanting to Mithra to bring order to the Sun is echoed by Silicon Valley founders funding contemporary technologies such as solar geoengineering. Amid planetary overheating, technological systems promise increasingly sophisticated forms of environmental management, turning us towards new gods of computation and optimisation. The invocation of a higher power is not simply an expression of faith, but a psychological and political response to crisis: if Nature is not merely given, but can be appeased or mediated, then uncertainty becomes something that can be acted upon. The Sun is being addressed again—only now the sky is the altar.
Public opening: Friday, October 2, 5–8pm
Exhibition: October 2–18, 2026
Hours: Thursday–Sunday, 2–7pm and by request
Tickets: EUR 10 / reduced 8
On October 14, a live performance by the artists, A Shadow Takes No Room in Space, summons reverberations of an ancient acoustic world—sounding a lost language and forgotten tones into existence.
The second chapter of HOUSE at Halle am Berghain is artistically directed by Juliet Kothe. The exhibition is realised in partnership with Autotelic Foundation, and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, and Christopher Seagon. With gratitude to the Department of Ancient West Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Prof. Andrés-Toledo, FEZANA Professor of Zoroastrian Languages and Literatures in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto.
