worromorrow
Martins Kohout
Jan 22 - Feb 28, 2026
 

Following their solo show at Meetfactory in Prague until January 11, 2026, EXILE is pleased to present a new solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Martins Kohout entitled worromorrow. It is the artist’s fifth solo show at EXILE since 2014.

In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), OG–gothboy Jean Baudrillard introduces a pretty extreme theory that I have always found very interesting. He positions death as the nemesis of capitalism, arguing that it poses a fundamental challenge to its cosmology, because it cannot be integrated into systems of productivity, accumulation, or exchange. In premodern societies, as well as some prevailing non-capitalist cultures, death has functioned within systems of symbolic exchange: it was ritualised, collectively mediated, and embedded within cyclical conceptions of time in which life and death were understood as mutually implicated rather than opposed. The dead remained symbolically active within the social body through funerary rites, mourning practices, and forms of remembrance that sustained an ongoing relationship between the living and the dead. Capitalism, by contrast, seeks to neutralise this threat by expelling death from symbolic circulation altogether – spatially, socially, and conceptually. With the rise of modernist binary cosmology, graveyards were gradually displaced to the outskirts of cities; dying is medicalised, privatised, and hidden from everyday life; death is fixed as an absolute end rather than a reversible moment within a shared symbolic economy. What replaces symbolic exchange is a linear temporality organised around production, accumulation, and progress, in which only what can circulate as value is permitted to exist. Against this, symbolic exchange insists on reversibility: on cycles, returns, and forms of loss that cannot be fully resolved, accumulated, or mastered.

Death, both as aesthetics and ontological proposition, appears across Martins Kohout’s world of worromorrow as an ambient condition circulating through sound, image, and material form. It haunts the fatality of sinkholes, the ghostly choral voices, the cold, purgatorial blue light that fills the gallery, and the figure of the crow as an omen of loss or misfortune. Read through Baudrillard’s framework, Martins’ sustained investment in suspended states, looping structures, hints of DIY ‘messiness’ and unresolved temporalities takes on an anti-capitalist dimension. The works cultivate a ritual that steps outside the cosmology of productivity and linear time, grounding their world instead in a liminal loop that doesn’t build toward resolution, efficiency, or closure.

Entering the gallery, we are welcomed by a pale, cold blue light and a soft, uncertain, improvised singsong – “a friend… of a friend… of a friend…” – set against a constant hum that drifts between harmony and discord. Recorded collaboratively with a group of friends, the looping sound piece Still there, more or less, or not (Reanimated) spreads across both levels of the exhibition, bleeding into the auras of other works. The voices are intentionally imperfect, neither polished nor professional, honouring play and doing something for the sake of doing it, without a fixed outcome or product. The piece establishes a sense of interconnection between strangers, ghostly and unresolved.

Upstairs, Driving Fast Nowhere. Down. Down. Down. hits a more manic note. The hypnotic, vertigo-inducing loop follows a metallic steel ball plummeting through a rapid sequence of found images of sinkholes. The reflective sphere – a tool commonly used in 3D design to capture and mirror surrounding environments – falls endlessly as the images cut abruptly from one to the next, collapsing into one another like parallel universes swallowed by successive black holes. Martins spoke to me about a recent sinkhole that opened in Bangkok, where onlookers moved closer rather than fleeing, filming the expanding void on their phones. This impulse feels symptomatic of a contemporary attention economy shaped by crisis consumption: a form of spectatorship with a kink for catastrophe. The relentless, accelerated falling of the ball translates the tempo and affective logic of algorithmic image culture into a bodily sensation of lost control. Speed, repetition, and abrupt cuts produce a state of agitation that echoes what Franco “Bifo” Berardi (another devout Baudrillard fan!) describes as a “basic pathogenic picture” symptomatic of late-capitalist society: hyper-stimulated nervous energy, informational overload, and permanently strained attention. In this condition, acceleration becomes a source of panic and exhaustion. Crucially, for Berardi, this psychic strain is inseparable from material conditions of labour: from the instability, competition, and chronic uncertainty that define contemporary forms of work.

Minutes before our phone call to discuss the exhibition, Martins texted me: “just need to send few more emails, hustling for jobs etc.” I replied: “I spent the better half of today drafting an email to a Museum in Zurich who invited me to review an exhibition in February – they asked me to book my own flights and they’ll reimburse, but i can’t afford the flights.” Precarity surfaced repeatedly in our conversation and runs throughout the exhibition as a shared condition shaping how the work is made. Martins’ commitment to DIY – visible in the makeshift cardboard frame and exposed cables of Driving Fast Nowhere. Down. Down. Down. and the imperfect soundtrack – operates simultaneously as a political position and a material necessity. It reflects the material histories, working conditions and infrastructures of the Eastern European context Martins and I both originally come from, while pushing against capitalism’s demand for seamless production, optimisation, and polish. The nervous acceleration described by Berardi echoes with the lived experience of the precarious creative class.

In the adjacent upstairs room, the looping work Grumpers (Late to The Joke) fixes its frame on a 3D-rendered window. Beyond it, soft, petal-like particles drift against a dark, stormy night sky, lending the scene a subdued cinematic, almost spiritual quality. To me, these particles function as a world-building device. Without getting too nerdy, they reminded me of the floating, ominous particles that signal the “Upside Down” in Stranger Things – a visual cue that we have crossed into a parallel reality, or a different register of time. The particles remain constant while a solitary crow intermittently enters the frame with the force of a jump scare. This macabre companion – half-organic, half-robotic – sometimes stares directly into the camera with shimmering, button-like eyes; at other moments it turns its back, its mechanical feathers ruffled by the gathering storm. Described by the artist as more of a “presence or an encounter” than a video work, the piece is rendered at an extremely low samples rate, resisting polish in favour of something eerie, uncanny, and faintly retro-nostalgic. The work emerged from Martins observing birds from their living room window, isolating a mundane moment as if viewed from a dystopian future shaped by environmental collapse and technological singularity – a world in which threatened species persist in a quasi robo-zombified state.

Repetition and ‘the loop’ runs through the exhibition as a structuring principle, tied both to cyclical time and to states of liminality or haunting that resist linear progression. A commitment to this circular sense of time is articulated with particular clarity in Martins’ earlier performance at the National Gallery of Prague in 2021, which centred on argon particles – a gas that rarely binds with others and remains chemically unchanged over vast spans of time. As Martins explained to me, the same particle you are breathing right now could have passed through someone else’s lungs centuries ago. The work redirects focus away from monumental history toward a residual minor-register. Above all, it encapsulates Martins’ investment in feeling and relation, proposing connection through accidental proximity and shared material passage, kinship between not-so-strangers – between a friend… of a friend… of a friend… of a friend.

Sonja Teszler

 

→Leaving the house with an open fire, but briefly, solo exhibition at Meetfactory, Prague

→Martins Kohout artist link

→Martins Kohout website