Thomas Ming-Hui Stanka presents the duo exhibition “Habitat” at Sternschuppen Berlin under his curatorial project CYCLOPS, bringing together paintings by Joscha Blankenburg and photography by Ilja Niederkirchner.
There are places we can step into and others that settle within us. ‘Habitat’ is not a place. It is a way of being. A practice. Something repeated until it feels natural.
In the works of Niederkirchner and Blankenburg, space shifts from something given to something constructed, rehearsed, inherited. What appears as environment reveals itself as staging: built, coded, maintained. A habitat does not simply exist. It is continuously produced.
Blankenburg’s work condenses this production into a closed social world. A landscape of late capitalist surfaces where power operates through images, bodies, and ritualized gestures. Hunting lodges, villas, golf courses, faces, not as locations, but as symbols within a system that sustains itself. Nature becomes backdrop, a distant fiction, while social life refines itself into ever more controlled appearances. His figures seem both composed and depleted, shaped and worn down by the very habitat that sustains them. At times, something older breaks through, echoes of inherited belief and lingering ideological ghosts.
Niederkirchner approaches the idea from another direction. Working from his photographic archive, he brings together landscapes, fragments of memory, and traces of lived experience. His images appear in pairs, not identical, yet connected. Meaning unfolds in the tension between them. What emerges are not single images, but spaces of relation. There is something cinematic in this unfolding, a sense of movement and narrative without resolution. From documentary fragments, something imagined begins to take shape, an interior landscape.
The exhibition does not aim for a singular statement. The works follow different logics, yet meet within the same space. Meaning is not fixed, but arises in passing, through encounters, transitions, and moments of friction.
Framework program
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Thursday, Apr 30, 2026, 6 – 10 pm
Opening reception
Saturday, May 9, 2026, 7 pm
Artist Talk (de) & Music
CYCLOPS presents an artist talk on “Habitat” with Joscha Blankenburg and Ilja Niederkirchner, followed by music from Stefan Müller.
Opening hours:
Apr 30: 6 – 10 pm
May 1/2/3/10: 2 – 8 pm
May 9: 2 – 8 pm (plus an evening event)
Closed betw. May 4 – 8.
Exhibition Venue
Sternschuppen
Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz 2 · 10178 Berlin · Germany
