CURRENT & UPCOMING
OUT OF THIN AIR
Public Art Commission | Gustave-Eiffel School, Berlin | Commissioned by the State of Berlin | 2026–ongoing
Out of Thin Air is a permanent public artwork for the new Gustave-Eiffel School in Berlin-Pankow. The project incorporates recycled concrete from the former GDR school buildings alongside stones and objects contributed by the school community, embedding the material history of the site within new sculptures and reliefs.
Responding to the wind-exposed topography of the historic Windmühlenviertel, the works translate patterns of air, pressure and erosion into sculptural forms.
SELECTED NEWS
LOOSE GROUND
Group Exhibition | El Hub, Mexico City | October 2025
A selection of videos from Sebastian Acker’s Crude Devices series was presented in Loose Ground, part of B-LA-M, a three-year art exchange connecting Berlin, Los Angeles and Mexico City.
The exhibition explored moments when perception slips and stability falters — when our sense of ground, history, or material certainty begins to loosen.
Featuring works by Sebastian Acker, Patricia Detmering, Nadja Verena Marcin and Ilyn Wong. Image: Nadja Verena Marcin.
TEUFELSEE BIENNALE
Art Festival | Teufelsee, Grunewald, Berlin | August 2025
Sebastian Acker presented Dune, a site-specific installation imagining the layers of human and more-than-human histories embedded in the sand quarry of Berlin’s Grunewald, as part of the Teufelsee Biennale, a one-day programme of performances, poetry, installations and interventions around the lake.
IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD (FOR REAL)
Video Art Screening | Kino Moviemento, Berlin | July 2024
Are we creating our own hell on this planet? Are we creating depressed robots? Are we turning all of nature into products? Should we merge our consciousness with technology? These and related questions formed the thematic framework for this video art screening at Kino Moviemento, Germany’s oldest cinema, curated by Clemens Wilhelm as part of B-LA-M.
Sebastian Acker’s Can’t See the Wood for the Trees was presented alongside works by Neozoon, Alisi Telengut, Elisa Jule Braun, Ilyn Wong, Dagmar Schürrer, Nicolás Rupcich and Ale Bachlechner.
RESIDENZPFLICHT I-X
Group exhibition & panel discussion | Galerie Schloss Biesdorf, Berlin | June – October 2023
Sebastian Acker’s work from the Residenzpflicht scholarship programme was presented in the group exhibition Residenzpflicht I–X at Galerie Schloss Biesdorf.
The exhibition concluded with a panel discussion on artistic practice within the programme, with Sebastian Acker, Britta Schubert from Berlin’s Büro für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum and other artists and cultural practitioners, hosted by Stefka Ammon.
SEBASTIAN ACKER: PLEASE KEEP THE DOOR CLOSED
Solo exhibition | Kunstverein Dresden, Germany | November 2022 – January 2023
For his first solo exhibition in his former hometown, Sebastian Acker developed a site-specific installation around Can’t See the Wood for the Trees, a video recorded on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The invisible flows of goods and raw materials passing through the landscape meet the physical fabric of the exhibition space itself, drawing attention to the material origins and infrastructures that remain hidden in both.
20 SECONDS FOR ART
Award & public screening | Austria | June–August / November 2022
The short video Trans, recorded on the Trans-Siberian Railway and later expanded into Can’t See the Wood for the Trees, was shown on more than 3,400 screens across Austria's underground trains, stations, trams and buses as part of a public art project by KÖR – Kunst im Öffentlichen Raum Wien and Info Screen.
Following the three-month screening programme, the work received the 20 Seconds for Art Award. The award ceremony took place at the Viennale in Vienna, where the jury recognised the work for “posing numerous questions about consumption, transport logistics, and globalisation through minimalist formal language.”
SEBASTIAN ACKER: TRACES OF OTHER PLACES
Artist’s book | Kerber Berlin | 2021
Traces of Other Places brings together photographs, film stills and travel notes from an often surreal-looking journey through China’s landscape of replicas, including the reconstruction of an entire Austrian village. The book examines Western ideas of originality and authenticity through the encounter between these copies and their European counterparts.
Published by Kerber Berlin with support from Stiftung Kunstfonds, the book includes texts by Annette Tietenberg and Sylvia Chan. It was presented at Paris Photo in 2021, where Acker held a signing session.
Press: Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 2021
TRANSPRESENCE
Group exhibition, screenings & talks | Studio 4413, Saint Petersburg, Russia | December 2019
Curated by Mariya Dimitrieva, Transpresence brought together artists from post-Soviet and Western backgrounds who had participated in a residency programme in Siberia earlier that year. Sebastian Acker presented footage shot during the residency that would later become Can’t See the Wood for the Trees. The event is supported by Dekabristen e.V., Berlin, with funding from the German Federal Foreign Office.
RESIDENZPFLICHT SCHOLARHIP
Scholarship | A project by msk7, awarded by the Berlin Senate | 2019
Sebastian Acker was the fifth recipient of the Residenzpflicht Scholarship. Initiated by the artist collective msk7 and supported by the Berlin Senate, the programme temporarily opened self-contained refugee shelters to contemporary artistic approaches and developments. Ten Modular Accommodations for Refugees (MUF) in Berlin were extended alternately with an additional mobile module, where ten international grant-holders worked artistically for one month.
The work developed during the residency was presented in a group exhibition at Haus der Statistik in September 2020.
MAY THE BRIDGES I BURN LIGHT THE WAY
Group exhibition | Manifesta 12 Collateral Programme, Palermo, Italy | June 2018
Curated by María Inés Plaza Lazo in collaboration with Alina Kolar, Dalia Maini and Exile Gallery, the exhibition formed part of the collateral programme for Manifesta 12 in Palermo.
Sebastian Acker presented Remotely Native, a site-specific installation combining botanical signs with a custom-built satellite map to trace the origins and movement of plants.
Press: Artviewer
DIVING INTO A TEACUP
Screening | Institute of Contemporary Arts London | January 17, 2018, 6:30 pm
Mountain Village by Sebastian Acker & Phil Thompson was screened at Institute of Contemporary Arts as part of London Short Film Festival.
» The surreal world of copycat towns in China, the hopes and fears revealed in a garden of memories, the tense last stages of a Balkans refugee route, and how a spatula lost in space could create a cascade of collisions for planet Earth. The microscopic lens reveals much about who we are in this diverse selection of new films. «
MOUNTAIN VILLAGE
Solo exhibition, in collaboration with Phil Thompson | Neuer Ravensburger Kunstverein, Germany | November 2017
Mountain Village brought together works developed during Sebastian Acker and Phil Thompson’s journey through China’s landscape of replicas, where sections of European cities and even an entire Austrian village have been reconstructed. Juxtaposing these replicas with their European counterparts, the exhibition explored Western ideas of originality, authenticity and the construction of place.