Lina Lapelytė has unveiled We Make Years Out of Hours at Hamburger Bahnhof, an immersive exhibition that merges sculpture, performance, and sound installation into a continuously evolving environment. Commissioned by the CHANEL Next Prize, the project reimagines the museum’s historic hall as a contemplative space centered on repetition, duration, and collective participation.
Running through January 10, 2027, the exhibition reflects Lapelytė’s long-standing exploration of labor, endurance, and shared experience. At the same time, it reinforces Hamburger Bahnhof’s ongoing focus on experimental and cross-disciplinary contemporary art practices.
A Monumental Installation Built Through Collective Action
At the center of the exhibition sits a large-scale installation composed of 400,000 wooden cubes. Rather than functioning as a static sculpture, the work continuously changes form through interaction with performers and visitors, who rearrange the cubes into temporary structures throughout the exhibition period.
Consequently, the installation resists permanence and instead emphasizes transformation through accumulation and repeated gestures. The shifting landscape becomes both a physical environment and a metaphor for time itself, where hours gradually build into years through collective action.
Weekly performances activate the installation further through live vocal compositions based on poetry by writers including Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, Ocean Vuong, and Forugh Farrokhzad. Through these texts, Lapelytė introduces themes of memory, displacement, intimacy, and resilience into the spatial experience.
Performance, Sound, and Social Reflection
Although grounded in installation art, We Make Years Out of Hours also reflects Lapelytė’s broader interdisciplinary practice, which frequently combines music, opera, and social commentary. Her work often examines systems of labor, vulnerability, and collective behavior through subtle performative structures rather than direct narrative.
Accordingly, the exhibition transforms Hamburger Bahnhof into an environment shaped equally by sound, movement, and participation. Visitors move through evolving arrangements of wooden forms while performances unfold around them, blurring distinctions between audience, performer, and artwork.
The project also aligns with Hamburger Bahnhof’s anniversary programming as an “open museum,” emphasizing accessibility, participation, and experimental artistic dialogue. Furthermore, the exhibition highlights Berlin’s continued role as a major center for large-scale contemporary installation and performance art.
We Make Years Out of Hours remains on view at Hamburger Bahnhof through January 10, 2027.