Fiona Bennett is known as a hat artist far beyond national borders. Born in Brighton in 1966, raised in Berlin, three years after the fall of the Wall she opened her first studio in the city’s newly conquered center. Today, her hat salon in the midst of the Potsdamer Strasse gallery scene is the primary stage of her creative energy, an exhibition space for her creations, which have always had an inherent sculptural power. Surreal, profound and light at the same time.
Conceived by a free spirit that needs no categories. Fiona Bennett reinvents interiors, such as most recently the “Flush” in the Berlin Wintergarten Variete (with Hans-Joachim Böhme), creates costumes for theater and film, and is a successful entrepreneur and member of the “International Women’s forum”.
Her hat object “Nosedive” was shown at VON BARTHA Gallery in Basel, was part of the exhibition “Surrealism & Beyond” at Museum Boljmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 2016 and is currently on view at Alexander Ochs Gallery.
“Nosedive II,” created by Fiona Bennett specifically for the Grain Test Store, departs from familiar territory. Connects the headwork with the space and the space with the viewer. And allows an image to emerge in the reflection that has as many facets as the person who sees themselves in it.

Antonio Navas, born under the equatorial sun of Caracas, Venezuela, has woven his life’s canvas with a tapestry of innate artistic flair. A chance encounter at the age of 9, when he brushed against the hand of a wailing Pope depicted in Francis Bacon’s portrayal of Innocent X, forever imprinted in him the vulnerability and unease that art can evoke. His artistic journey has since been a quest for his place within the grand tapestry of humanity, frequently drawing inspiration from the annals of history. Music, an indispensable lifeline, permeates every corner of Antonio’s existence. His devotion to its melodic embrace is irrevocable, a sentiment embodied by his cherished 1965 vinyl of “A Love Supreme,” a source of solace and focus. Antonio’s perceptive eye, honed through his art direction pursuits, and impeccable taste, cultivated during his tenure as a creative director, have yielded unforgettable creations for renowned global brands. The cosmic marriage of photography and the enchanting realm of advertising played into his favor, cultivating connections with luminaries like Richard Avedon, Elliott Erwitt, Nadav Kander, Ralf Schmerberg and collaborations with artistic icons including Andreas Gursky and Annie Leibovitz. In his art, he masterfully bridges the chasm between aesthetics and commerce, a rare feat, and generously imparts this gift to the aspiring talents he mentors. Antonio’s brilliance lies in his ability to articulate profound cultural truths that resonate across geographical boundaries. His work reverberates with visual resonance, his philosophy eloquently communicated through deeds rather than words. His legacy is not just a collection of creations but a legacy of actions that continue to shape the artistic world he adorns.

Michael Kirch has been working as an artist, founder and investor in Berlin since 2014. Prior to that, he worked for thirteen years in New York and London as a mathematician and Wall Street strategist. In his studio in Berlin-Neukölln he has created a series of sculptures and kinetic installations in bronze, marble and alabaster that are elegant and original.
In Michael Kirch’s works, sensuality, sexuality and beauty combine to create a creative, healing force. As the viewer walks around each sculpture, object and viewer together play a game of shyness and boldness, vulnerability and security, being seen and hiding. The sculptures balance in aesthetic harmony, revealing a rich inner life through a change of perspective.
For example, in “Balancing Act / Balanceakt,” a black polyester sphere 16 cm in diameter glides across a 3-meter-long white marble slab. Even at rest, the physical presence of the 100 kg marble slab, suspended on thin steel wires and floating freely in space, is impressive. The slow movement of the sphere seems to come to a complete halt at times, adding to the sense of tension and wonder. The constantly alternating movement, created by an invisible balancing mechanism, is an invitation to silently meditate.
The Balancing Act is the first installation of its kind. It relies on complex technology and intelligence in the controls to balance the sphere with movements imperceptible to the naked eye. The marble slab was intricately handcrafted. Man and machine work together.
Michael Kirch says, “The invisible puppeteer performs the Balancing Act solely for our entertainment. The performance has a calming and peaceful effect. In this way, the Balancing Act is a counter to the machines that cause unrest and war on social media without being recognized.”

Choose your fighter is a performance piece exploring the era of digital identity. The work challenges the supposed distinction between online and IRL. An artificial realm glitches into reality, morphing generations of players with their online avatars. 

Set on a road with a scene of cars, the performers embody movements and animations from these digital worlds, while sound effects inspired by online gaming pierce through a cinematic soundscape. The garments reflect themes of morality seen in survival video games — tactical gear, combat boots, and blood splattered miniskirts. The audience is invited to follow characters as they travel out of bounds and stretch the limits of the digital body.

Dorothea Nold is a visual artist with a background in sculpture and installation. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (studio Vincent Barré and Richard Deacon). She has been invited to numerous residencies and research trips, mainly in Turkey, Armenia, Iran, Afghanistan, China and Mali. In her artistic work she deals with transformation processes of physical and social spaces, its connections, intersections and interdependencies. Her sculptural interventions explore its limits and borders and also its convertibility. Nold has been writing a PhD since 2013 at the HfBK Hamburg with a scholarship from the Cusanuswerk. Her research analyzes initiated, produced and temporarily transformed religious, holy and transcendental spaces in urban environments.

Since the beginning of his artistic research, Bernhard Vierling has been circling around questions of inner, outer and collective processes: in the form of drawing, notation, sculpture, performance, cartography or systemic art action. This work has evolved over the past decades from participatory-performative art projects in organizational contexts (consulting.art&friends) to drawing to installative experimental arrangements and neo-scientific lecture-performances. The series of essence-apparatuses synthesize these strands of investigation. They open up a complex experiential space that incorporates different schools of thought and experimentation – including radical constructivism, pragmatism, recourse to alchemy – and allows a Third to emerge. The last apparatuses deal with the condensation of philosophical concepts, e.g. in ointments, creams, lotions, the liquification of light, the production of earth before man appeared, etc. The used materials and crafts result from the questions of the processes.

Stefano Taiuti is a Roman artist based in Berlin who since the end of the eighties has investigated, crossed and mixed body expression techniques by intertwining the principles of modern Western and Eastern theatrical cultures. By experimenting its presence in the halls of small theaters and in the crowded spaces of the clubs of the major European capitals, in video performance experiments and sitespecific installations, Taiuti has made his body the very place of the event, making it fluid and traversable by forms and genres. In his work he explores the potential of the body as a tool for experience and a medium to access alternative states of consciousness. He sees the body as a “spiritual mechanism” and teaches his research in classes and workshops. He designs and realizes dance pieces and performances where the theatrical device acts a generator of multiple metaphors. 

Born in Poland in 1985, Kinga Gradowska creates mystical figures and images by laying out elaborate upcycled textiles before “painting them with a camera lens.” Always inspired by nature, her subjects revolve around a supernatural existence of faces which she believes are omnipresent in all dimensions. The artist sees faces in nature and wants her viewers to delve deeper into their souls and understand their connection to Mother Earth (hence the upcycled materials). Her works have unmistakable references to the composite heads of 16th century Giuseppe Arcimboldo, in which he also created faces from natural resources such as vegetables and fruits. Gradowska’s art can therefore be described as modern mannerism with some abstract and surrealist influences, all bundled into a photographic scheme.

Lars Hartmann, born 1972, is dyslexic. Through his works, he shows us his experience of being confronted and excluded by inaccessible text. When the paper becomes part of the narra- tive and letters are replaced by voiceless nails, new dimensions open. Cracks, crevices, wrinkles, dents, and frayed edges make us sense that there are more to the stories than those written in black and white. A secret visual language untranslatable by Google’s AI. 

Lars Hartmann lives in a world where letters form visual patterns instead of meaning and where paper is more interesting than words it holds. 

Rixa Rottonara is an interdisciplinary Artist based in Berlin and Südtirol. She graduated in performing Arts and Aerial Acrobatics in 2018 and right after started her own company “Rottenart Productions”. Here she connects visual and performing artforms, working with changing artists as well as doing artistic research projects. In the last years she worked with the Vereinigte Bühnen Bozen and Bauhaus Dessau and researched on the use of technology, such as gyro sensorsand AI, within the artistic process

Tina Zimmermann is a conceptual artist from Berlin working on the intersections of humanity and technology, nature and civilization, consciousbess and function. By collecting, recontextualizing and recomposing the collective debris of our consumer society as well as the naturally growing and dying biomass of the organic life cycles, she celebrates nature’s infinite creation and output and asks questions about beauty, necessity and sanity in the age of the Antropozen.

She studied Industrial Design and Interdisciplinary Art in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her video works have been produced e.g. for the Berlin TV Tower and the Residence of the German President, Schloss Bellevue. After 20 years of extensive work in the media art field she has mostly resigned from the purely mental and de-humanized computer work in favour of physical, sensual, material-based creativity in the fields of installation and sculpture as well as bodymind practice. She is a resident artist of Mahalla Berlin.

CoCo was born in Tokyo. She started to work as bodymodification performer in the year 2000 in the Tokyo underground scene. Her unique style is a mix of cult japanese classic form and moden gothic decadence. Her performances between 1999-2011 had a taste of death and natural scents. She moved to Berlin in 2011. For the past 10 years CoCo has focused on body movement with bondage – her native culture. She is collaborating with butoh dancers.