Annika Kahrs Conducts a Requiem for Public Spaces

Places and their various meanings are central to German artist Annika Kahrs’s practice. Over the past 15 years, she has made films and performances everywhere from warehouses to train stations, typically using music to explore their complex stories. So it feels only natural that ‘OFF SCORE’, the largest survey of Kahrs’s work to date, has a strong site-specific component: over the duration of the exhibition, several pieces will be shown across Berlin in specially selected locations.

Many other works, however, including three standout films from 2022–25, are displayed in the classical gallery space of Hamburger Bahnhof. Attempts to evoke the original settings – church pews, park benches, Gothic archways in the ribbed glass partitions between viewing areas – initially feel like diminished substitutes for the historically charged places where the films were recorded. If ‘a space consists not only of four walls but also its atmosphere,’ as Kahrs writes in the catalogue, how can that spirit survive translation into a screen-based exhibition format?

Kahrs’s answer lies in clever editing and close observation. Le Chant des Maisons (The Song of the Houses, 2022), for example, captures a group of children, teens and adults performing polyphonic singing and brass arrangements in a deconsecrated church in Lyon. Behind them, builders erect a wood-beam structure, occasionally joining the score with rhythmically pulsing drills and screwdrivers. Lingering shots of architectural details anthropomorphize the dilapidated building. Raindrops dripping down stained-glass windows appear like tears, while religious statues surrounded by rubble and cables seem to vocalize the performers’ melancholic tones – cries of grief for their once-glorious home.

This sense of longing for formerly thriving public spaces threads through the films in ‘OFF SCORE’. In La Banda (The Band, 2024), an intergenerational orchestra processes through the sleepy streets of Olevano Romano. Empty shops and signs advertising apartments allude to population decline and economic stagnation in the Italian town. While they ultimately unite for a climactic melody overlooking the rolling countryside, the despondent musicians – oldest 80, youngest 8 – initially wander alone or in pairs, letting out discordant, birdlike calls for companionship on their flutes and horns.

Kahrs’s latest film, created especially for this exhibition, subtly suggests the digital age is partly to blame for such feelings of disconnection. A Cashier’s Opera (2025) is shot across four Berlin department stores: previously bustling social hubs now reduced to soulless interiors and deserted escalators, casualties of the contemporary preference for online shopping. The adolescent singers in bloodied clothing shuffling like zombies through Ring-Center II feel a little on the nose. Yet moments of tenderness emerge: an opera singer performs in a vacant Lichtenberg store after a guided tour by a former worker who reminisces proudly about the people and products that once animated its floors.

All the films in ‘OFF SCORE’ are experienced through headphones that sense each viewer’s location and play audio corresponding to where they stand. This innovative approach not only solves the problem of overlapping sound in film exhibitions, it also amplifies the themes in Kahrs’s oeuvre. Once plugged in, I feel locked into a personal sound bubble, disconnected from other visitors.

The sense of device-induced isolation is magnified when I rush to catch the performance For Two to Play on One (2012) on the other side of the museum. A jovial piano duet drifts from within the room, inviting visitors to enter one at a time. Inside, the pianists stop, shuffle their sheet music and stare intently at the intruder. Why is this gaze so uncomfortable? Have we forgotten how to look one another in the eye without the crutch of a smartphone giving us an excuse to glance away? If Kahrs’s work is concerned with place, the pieces gathered here suggest we no longer know how to inhabit spaces fully. Above all, we’ve forgotten how to inhabit them together. 

Annika Kahr’s ‘OFF SCORE’ is on view at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, until 3 May 2026

_{Main image: Annika Kahrs, Le Chant des Maisons (The Song of the Houses), 2022, film still. Courtesy: © Annika Kahrs and Produzentengalerie Hamburg}