THE COLLIDING ONES – Viron Erol Vert

01. March 2026 – 31. May 2026

THE COLLIDING ONES – Viron Erol Vert

Opening: Sunday, 01. March 2026, 11 am

The first exhibition of 2026 at Kunstverein Arnsberg is a solo show by Viron Erol Vert. His artistic practice deals with the inner states of being human: with transitions, closeness and distance, with the question of how individuals relate to one another and how origin, memory, and projection shape the self. Painting, a new focus within his practice in recent years, forms the core of the exhibition; it is complemented by objects, drawings, sound, and a spatial installation. Vert grew up in northern Germany and has Mediterranean roots. Migration, movement, and the origins of things are recurring starting points for his artistic research. Anatolian-Greek myths repeatedly appear as models for thought, with Vert combining ancient narratives with contemporary themes. This creates cross-connections between geographies, cultures, materials, and forms of expression, as well as between different timelines. In recent years, Vert has developed a series of paintings that deal intensively with the motif of the Argonaut legend. This narrative of a collective experience of a group serves him less as a narrative template than as a space for reflection on encounters with strangers and on transformation as an existential process of all life paths. At the same time, his current paintings are closely linked to his experiences of Berlin nightlife, where he was active for many years during the post-Wall phase of Berlin's history, parallel to his studies and artistic work. The tensions between day and night, light and shadow, East and West, between languages and different ways of life have shaped his life and work and continue to influence his artistic output to this day. The story of the Argonauts thus becomes a symbol of the collective experience of societies in a state of constant, profound upheaval.

The exhibition The Colliding Ones is conceived as a spatial sequence of passages, thresholds, and juxtapositions. The title refers to the Symplegades, the moving rocks at the entrance to the Black Sea, which in legend represent the greatest obstacle to the journey: two rocks that approach and collide, shattering everything that tries to pass between them. At the same time, Vert does not intend the motif to be read exclusively in a critical light. Here, collision also means to intersect, to overlap, and to encounter. What is meant is an intense clash of different perspectives, personalities, and attitudes toward life, an image that can also be applied to complex urban societies in any geography. This concept is not presented narratively in the exhibition, but rather spatially. Visitors move, much like the traveling Argonauts, toward and through various artistic works and constellations. Designed as a multisensory spatial color atmosphere, the exhibition concept creates a collective space of experience in which nine sound compositions invite visitors to pause, arrive, and linger.

Like the Argonauts, visitors can embark on a journey together or individually. The sound installation was created in collaboration with Berlin-based producer Headless Horseman and combines atmospheric electronic soundscapes with transcendental, cosmic voice collages by Viron Erol Vert.The Colliding Ones understands passage and life paths not exclusively as metaphors, but as experiences: as movement between poles, as friction without resolution, as a continuous in-between and transformation. Like the Symplegades themselves, the exhibition remains in motion and opens up a space for thought in which human beings become visible: observing, observed, and always in transition.

Viron Erol Vert has exhibited internationally, including Club under the Fog, Busan Biennale (2025), THREE HAPPY ARCHES, Fraunhofer Institute, Frankfurt am Main (2025), the immersive project The Hermit at EMST Athens (2023/24), and Atoms, Souls, Senses at Villa Romana, Florence (2022). Previous solo exhibitions include Garden of Ornaments (Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 2023), Club Telesterion (Speaking to Ancestors, Wasserspeicher Berlin, 2023), Born in the Purple (Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, 2017), The Chronicler (Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2014), and The Name of Shades of Paranoia (Galerie Wedding, Berlin, 2017). He developed the exhibition concept Ambereum for the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2018) and presented it as part of the Arts & Activism Programme of the Roskilde Festival (2019–2022).

Vert is the recipient of the Villa Romana Prize (2018), the LETTER Foundation Ludwig Gies Prize for Small Sculpture (2022), and the Art in Architecture Prize of the Orient Institute Istanbul and the Tarabya Cultural Academy (2023). Since 2024, he has been teaching in the MA Spatial Strategies program at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin.

Gefördert vom Kulturministerium NRW

Photodokumentation: Michel Ptasinski