Dark Matter, Köpenicker Chaussee 46, 10317 Lichtenberg, Berlin (Germany)
Dark Matter sits in a converted factory in Lichtenberg, three buildings Christopher Bauder bought in 2019, opened in 2021 as a permanent home for his light work with his studio WHITEvoid. I got there at eight, dropped my jacket in a locker in the already-black entrance hall, and someone explained the route before letting me through — one path, seven rooms, go at your own pace. Entry runs on timed slots, no more than twenty-five people per group, so the rooms never fill up the way you’d expect from somewhere this popular. Then the door in front of me opened onto the first room, and the mirrors of Liquid Sky took over.
The space doubled and redoubled itself until there was no telling where the walls actually were. Next door, Inverse’s 169 black spheres hung suspended, moving together in slow synchronized choreography against a wall of white light behind them — sometimes drifting like a flock turning in flight, sometimes pulling into one shifting mass, slow enough that I ended up watching far longer than I’d planned to. Then Circular: circles of light swinging in time with the bass coming up through the floor, the whole room pulsing with it. These three rooms run on one continuous soundtrack by the Dutch composer Boris Acket, built as a triptych so the sound carries you from one into the next without a break.
Bonfire came next, and it did exactly what it says — sun chairs arranged around what looked, from a few metres back, like a real fire. The room itself wasn’t heated, so sitting there with the cold actually on my skin while the light did all the work of warmth was a strange kind of trick, the cold giving away what the light was pretending. After that, the floor turned into a projection at Polygon Playground — a 3D structure mapped straight onto the ground, and walking across it barefoot felt close to walking on ice, the surface slippery enough that I had to watch my footing even though I knew nothing underneath had changed.
Then the room that made me understand why people call it Tron, instead of Grid: a huge kinetic structure suspended above, lowering slowly toward whoever was lying beneath it, synchronised to a score by Robert Henke. I lay down. Watching it drop that close was intimidating, especially in the moments it hung lowest, right up until it pulled back again. The last room in that building was Tone Ladder, a ladder — aluminium, invisibly wired with sensors, every step and touch triggering its own sound and its own light. People were genuinely playing it, stepping up and down just to hear what came next.
To get to the temporary installation meant leaving that building entirely and walking to another one nearby, bigger, closer to a hangar than a gallery: the Transformator Hall. Inside was Forest Seasons, not a real one, lit up in ways no real forest ever is — lasers cutting through at some points, at others something closer to fireflies, small and scattered and gentle, drifting between the trees like something out of a story told to children at bedtime. The colour kept shifting too, blue into green into red into yellow, in time with the music, sharper when the track picked up and softer when it eased off. Along the sides, some swings stood in pairs — two on the northern side, two more on each lateral side — ordinary playground swings, just built for adults. I used one, swinging there in the dark with the lights shifting overhead, for a few minutes I felt like a kid again. A couple of people were stretched out on a bench nearby who looked, convincingly, like they’d fallen asleep there.
I went in at eight, and it closed at eleven, and three hours wasn’t enough. I can still feel the push of my feet off the ground, back and forth in the dark, lights shifting overhead.
Artène visited Dark Matter, 4 September 2026. All photography by Elasse
The (only) temporary installation Forest Seasons runs till 4 October — further audiovisual content at instagram.com/elass .