POOR TRAITS
BEYOND THE IMAGE. A GROUP EXHIBITION ON PORTRAITURE
OPENING RECEPTION
WEDNESDAY, 09. SEPTEMBER
BERLIN ART WEEK
09.09 - 13.09.2026
SUNDAY 13:00 - 17:00
ARTIST TALKS
TO BE ANNOUNCED
LOCATION
BBA GALLERY
KÖPENICKER STR. 96
10179 BERLIN-MITTE
EXHIBITION
09.09 - 24.10.2026
OPENING HOURS
TUESDAY - SATURDAY
12:00 - 18:00
What makes a person? A face, a memory, a gesture, a mask, a story? In an age of carefully curated identities, digital projections, and shifting social roles, and the blurred line between reality and fakeness the notion of the self has become increasingly fluid, fragmented, and complex.
Poor Traits brings together nine contemporary artists working across painting, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and mixed media. Rather than focusing on traditional portraiture, the exhibition explores the many ways in which identity is constructed, performed, concealed, and revealed.
The representation of the human being has been a central subject throughout art history. From ancient sculptures and Renaissance portraits to modern and contemporary explorations of identity, artists have continuously sought to capture not only physical appearance but also character, status, emotion, belief, and the complexities of the human condition. Across centuries, the portrayal of the self and others has remained one of art’s most enduring and significant themes, reflecting the values, questions, and concerns of each era.
Playing on the sound of the word “portraits,” the title Poor Traits suggests the imperfections, contradictions, vulnerabilities, and psychological complexities that make us human. The works in the exhibition move beyond physical likeness to examine character, emotion, memory, mental states, social expectations, and the traces we leave behind.
Some artists turn inward, investigating personal narratives and the architecture of the psyche. Others reflect on collective experiences, societal pressures, and the roles imposed upon us by culture, technology, and history. Together, the works challenge viewers to look beyond appearances and question how we perceive ourselves and others.
At a time when identity is constantly negotiated between the private and public sphere, Poor Traits invites us to consider the spaces between image and reality, presence and absence, self-perception and external projection.
The exhibition offers not a collection of portraits, but a study of what it means to be human.
FEATURED ARTWORKS
FEATURED ARTISTS
Jaroslav Drazil understands the portrait not as a mere likeness or a fleeting snapshot, but as a slowed-down, dialogic process of uncovering. In contrast to a present age dominated by the relentless staging and optimization of visual surfaces, he searches for the physical and emotional depth of the sitter: for traces of memory, doubt, care, and lived time.
In his painting practice, the approach to the subject unfolds layer by layer, demanding time. The portrait thus becomes a space for a genuine encounter. Rather than reproducing the presented, representative facade, Drazil reaches that essential being that only becomes visible through patient observation and listening, creating a face that does not vie for attention, but begins to speak through quiet contemplation.
In his work, Jens Juul explores how individuals are shaped by the communities to which they belong. At the core of his interest lies the interplay between the individual and their environment, as well as the question of how identity is formed through social relationships, societal structures, and concrete living conditions.
Within the context of Poor Traits, Juul views the portrait not as a judgment of personal character traits, but as an invitation to reflect. His works render visible how the human essence manifests as a product of community, belonging, and the external circumstances in which we live.
In Neural Decay, Mario Klingemann explores the machine-mediated afterlife of the human face. Using self-trained neural networks fed on late-19th and early-20th-century archival portraits, the generated faces depict nobody: they are statistical aggregations stripped of individuality, passing through further models of synthetic flaws to create documents of an origin that never existed.
By printing these works onto brushed stainless steel, the simulated deterioration is handed back to physical matter allowing the metal to scratch and tarnish on its own schedule. In the context of Poor Traits, these panels serve as portraits of portraiture itself. They act as a mirror to our current digital reality, performing in advance the automated afterlife of our own uploaded images, where all that remains is the poorest and most durable trait.
In his series Oscillations, Christian Lang explores the emotional resonance of childhood through unposed moments balancing vulnerability and strength. Utilizing textured glass and drawing on classical portrait aesthetics, his analog medium-format works dissolve fixed contours. The subject becomes a fragile manifestation suspended in a field of tension between intimacy and distance.
In the context of Poor Traits, the captured gazes refuse any rigid certainty. The image transforms into a reflective mirror, confronting viewers with the realization of how heavily their own ways of perception, personal memories, and conditionings shape the image of the other in the first place.
Anne Moses understands her works Sleeping Mimi and Closer not as traditional portraits centered on individual representation, but as condensed captures of fleeting moments in time. In her work, the face becomes a fragment of an intimate stocktaking, where states of repose and inner reflection take center stage.
Moving beyond the simple depiction of a specific personality, Moses broadens her gaze to encompass universal human emotions and conditions. By focusing on moments of pause, she transforms the face into a projection surface for collective experiences, evoking immediate resonance and empathy in the viewer.
Theresa Reiwer explores the conditions under which another being is recognized as present and living. A digitally constructed face confronts the viewer with a disarming, subtle familiarity, never entirely predictable. Rather than striving for idealized perfection, Reiser preserves the small imperfections that make an appearance feel inhabited, opening a space for empathy without ever fully concealing the digital nature of the medium.
Over time, the portrait transforms as network- and root-like structures permeate the figure. These organic yet digital entanglements feel like a natural extension of the entity, shifting the concept of identity away from the isolated individual toward a state of being formed through relationships. Reiser’s living portrait disrupts anthropocentric hierarchies, questioning why intelligence and agency are so frequently envisioned in human form while the biological networks of nature remain overlooked.
The face is an unstable surface. A stasis of solid air, constantly moving with a transformative memory. Shah explores the space between external identity and internal reality, bridging the systemic packaging of the self with its fluid, psychological core. In Legends, he presents an alphabetised riddle of birth names belonging to cultural icons who surrendered their private identities. Presented as 52 title cards, the work exposes the process through which the raw self is systematically dissolved to construct an immortal public avatar.
Expanding on this investigation of the self, the film Vellum transforms the human face into a fluid, moving sound sculpture. By 3D-extruding filmed portraits into rotating, warped landscapes set to an improvised double bass, Shah abstracts physical appearance into a psychological terrain. Information is deliberately concealed until the very end, demonstrating that a true portrait lies not in static likeness, but in the complex, hidden layers of human vulnerability.
In her piece 365, Sylvie Wozniak conceives portraiture as a meditative process requiring ritual continuity. Over the course of a full year, she captured faces on her smartphone every morning, reproducing them onto uniform, small rectangles of paper. This repetitive discipline becomes a daily rhythm akin to breathing, wherein the artist views herself as a tower swept by the wind, absorbing, passing through, and collecting the stories of others.
The face, as a permanently visible part of the body, serves Wozniak as the primary interface of communication. In this continuous archive, identity appears not as a fixed form, but as the mapping of a changing landscape whose true meaning reveals itself between the lines.
Sheung Yiu questions the portrait as a mere document of the face, viewing it instead as a floating signifier whose meaning emerges solely through the conditioned or biased gaze of the observer. Whether face readers, 19th-century criminologists, physiognomists, or modern facial recognition algorithms, all project their own rule systems and patterns onto the physical surface. What is objectively photographed recedes into the background; what matters is the visual culture through which the image is interpreted.
For Yiu, the vulnerability and flaw of the portrait lie in the mistaken belief that outer appearance offers evidence of an inner truth. Every over-interpretation ultimately reveals more about the viewer's own mindset than about the sitter. In the works presented at BBA, Yiu therefore shifts the focus away from his own face, turning a critical lens onto the mechanisms and traditions of portraiture's visual culture itself.
OFFICIAL MEDIA PARTNER
