Phantoms

Phantoms – Dominik Lejman St. Matthäus Church, Berlin, January 10, 2026 – February 15, 2026 Curated by Hubertus von Amelunxen photographs: Sonia Bober Images are superimposed on images, moving images on still paintings with geometric foundations. Polish artist Dominik Lejman has been hunting ghosts for three decades. His art, exhibited worldwide, superimposes video images onto abstract paintings. The paintings are briefly inhabited by revenants, phantoms – a disturbing art of alignment, imprisonment, and fall. “Time is out of joint,” says the ghost to Hamlet. In Dominik Lejman's works, people fall out of time into the cracks of the present – a paradox. They are phantoms, belonging to no time, but recurring in every time. Thus, viewing his paintings is like an apparition in which the ambivalence of the familiar and the uncanny is revealed; imprisonment and paradisiacal longing. Dominik Lejman's work is obsessive, its aesthetics following the movement of human existence, its orientation, with a careful mixture of doubt, humor, and despair. His work swings like a pendulum between revelation and repulsion, elevation and fall, Elysium and dungeon. Unique in his combination of content, media transmission, and aesthetics, Dominik Lejman has shaped the question of the possible in the absurd. Being haunted by phantoms means remembering something we never experienced in the present. All the more reason for Dominik Lejman's work to ask us how we deal with our presence and our time, and with what responsibility. The exhibition shows around 20 works from the period between 2000 and the present. An extensive program of readings, choreographies, performances, and lectures accompanied the exhibition. January 13, 2025 Ulrich Loock and Anda Rothenberg in conversation with Dominik Lejman January 20, 2025 Maria Colusi – Performance January 27, 2025 Poetry evening with Howard Altmann February 3, 2025 Performance by Leon Dziemaszkiewicz February 10, 2025 Jazz solo concert by Mikołaj Trzaska