Supposedly dead corners, unused niches, and residual spaces within the city represent potential sites for repurposing. Yet they offer far more than mere surfaces onto which new functions can be projected. In these non-places, or urban voids, material remnants accumulate that can be read like an archive of pluralistic lived realities. Joram Schön appropriates this material underside of urban utopias, grounded in his subjective perspective on the city. For him, these architectural and urban peripheral zones are just as compelling as the social infrastructures connected to them, whether used individually or collectively. With particular attentiveness to the environment surrounding us, Schön not only observes the vitality of (un)inhabited places, but also gathers his impressions, experiences, and above all objects into a continuously growing archive that is constantly being reorganized. His found materials become both the basis for miniature spatial constructions and a source of inspiration for drawings that he integrates into them.
At the Rearwindow of Hua International, an excerpt from this archive has been assembled in a site-specific manner. The shop window is a place where carefully selected goods are conventionally displayed in an appealing way. Filled with fashion, souvenirs, delicatessen products, or real estate advertisements, these display windows continuously attract new audiences. Detached from specific purchasing intentions, inventive displays encourage spontaneous consumption and impulse buying. Used as commercial vitrines, the windows facing the public space—and thereby pressing into everyday life—function as symbols of capitalist structures in which success is still measured by leaving shops carrying filled shopping bags.
Situated within the passageway leading to the Mercator Höfe, the storefront, through Schön’s installation, itself almost appears as a kind of urban void. Materials extracted from the city are thus returned to the urban environment. These are seemingly marginal, often overlooked materials—such as leftover market crates or plywood found on the roadside—which the artist transfers into new forms of existence. In doing so, he translates references to packaging and transportation systems into his own visual language, one that resists regulated order. Plausible proportions and logical perspectives are disregarded; interior and exterior spaces are inverted; walls become floors; entrances and glimpses into small interiors are either opened up or obstructed. The arrangement of the individual sculptures grants each a sense of autonomy while simultaneously revealing that the elements constituting the city’s vitality are part of a larger, constantly shifting structure. Rather than forming a closed system, these units appear open to extensions, additions, and new insertions, flexibly moving into the foreground or background. At the same time, the composition evokes the artistic appropriation of the storefront in its original function: everything is designed to be looked at more closely—and perhaps even desired. Schön encourages passersby to reconsider the urban environment with which his installation has merged.
The façades and interiors depict businesses such as gyms, saunas, snack bars, cafés, video rental stores, betting offices, jewelery shops, pharmacies, and sex shops; interspersed among them are rows of garages, storage spaces, and locker rooms. What all these places share is that they invite speculation about their referential origins and functions. Some point toward the immediate neighborhood in Schöneberg, while others reference Moabit, where the artist grew up and still lives today. The constant transformation and gentrification of urban districts shape Schön’s artistic practice, which consistently allows for multiple interpretations. The title Cabin Cluster can likewise be understood in different ways. One reading follows the term’s usage in the tourism industry, where it describes a group of holiday cabins situated within an idyllic landscape. Contemporary urban neighborhoods seem to function in a strikingly similar manner in the age of Airbnb: apartments rented through the company for short- and medium-term stays increasingly inscribe themselves into residential areas that are marketed as desirable environments, contributing in metropolitan centers worldwide to rising prices, shrinking living space for residents, and ultimately to the structural transformation of entire neighborhoods. Joram Schön’s Rearwindow presentation engages with precisely such dynamics, which also shape the area surrounding Potsdamer Straße. Cabin Cluster is an artistic cartography oscillating between documentary and staged imagery, addressing the diversity, vitality, mutability of urban neighborhoods, as well as the beauty of urbanity itself.
Joram Schön (b. 1991 in Berlin) lives and works between Berlin and Cologne. He studied Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and holds an MA in Art and Film from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). His practice—spanning drawing, installation, painting, and film—merges observations of nature and the urban sphere, investigating the shifts within urban space to articulate critical inquiries into topography, architecture, and landscape. Parallel to his visual work, Schön develops essayistic documentaries that interweave personal narratives with historical resonance and collective memory. His work has recently been presented in solo exhibitions at Lore Deutz (Cologne), Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Hamburg), and Das Gericht (Frankfurt). Recent group presentations include O-Town House (Los Angeles), Studio Hanniball (Berlin), and Galerie Anton Janizewski / Villa Grisebach (Berlin). In 2024, he was a Fellow at Villa Aurora, where he realized a mural and developed parts of his first feature-length essay film. His publication Mental Storage originated from the site-specific wall work created during the residency.
