Two Artists Rewriting Rules Through Time and Technology in Berlin Art Week

Left: Matalobos, 2024, graphite on paper, 20 x 30 cm. Right: From the series Ecdysis, 2023, handmade aluminium embossing, 20 x 30 cm. Images Courtesy of the Artist.

For Paula Santomé, the journey began with a simple church visit. What she found in Berlin’s St. Mary’s Church, a familiar depiction of Eve and the serpent, became the foundation for an entire exhibition challenging 2,000 years of narrative control. When I asked her about it, she was refreshingly direct: “Growing up as a woman in Western societies, and the lack of freedom in so many ways,” she told me, led her to trace these power structures back to their mythological origins.

Left to right: Left: Girl with Sphere I, 2025, handmade aluminium embossing, 29,7 x 42 cm. Images Courtesy of the Artist. Right: Girl with Sphere II, 2025, handmade aluminium embossing, 29,7 x 42 cm. Images Courtesy of the Artist.

What strikes me as particularly sophisticated about Paula’s approach is her understanding that images were the original mass media. “Imagine,” she said, “maybe many hundreds of years ago, or thousands of years ago, probably most of the people couldn’t even read.” Visual storytelling became the primary tool for spreading morality and control. She’s not just making pretty pictures about feminism, she’s conducting an archaeological dig into visual culture itself.

Sinister Garden, 2025, graphite on paper, 3,5 x 4,5 m. Images Courtesy of the Artist.

Her approach is methodical yet poetic, taking well-known medieval paintings of “The Fall of Man” and blowing them up until you feel small. “The idea of making this so big is because I want to create some sort of impact.” But there’s strategy in this scale: by making viewers physically smaller before these images, she recreates the power dynamics these myths were designed to establish, so that we are conscious of the manipulation. Paula isn’t just commenting on power structures; she demonstrates how visual culture creates them in the first place, understanding that contradiction isn’t weakness, but more so a reality.

Charmaine Poh, Installation view PalaisPopulaire, Twin, 2025. Mixed media, LED mights, jade bangles. Dreamstate, Youth is Wasted on the Young (self-portrait), 201/. Projection on fabric string. Photo: Mathias Schormann. © Charmaine Poh

Three thousand miles away in concept, Charmaine Poh’s journey to her current exhibition fascinates me precisely because it wasn’t calculated. Her discovery of AI as an artistic medium happened “by coincidence” during the pandemic, when she gained access to her 90s childhood television archives from Singapore. But what she’s done with that accident reveals an artist with extraordinary emotional intelligence, an understanding of how images can both harm and heal.

Charmaine Poh, Majie, Hands, 2016. Archival photographic print, 73 x 109 cm. © Charmaine Poh

“I used to be very ashamed of this experience,” Poh reflects on her childhood fame, “ashamed of being judged and like a double shaming, because you get judged by others, so then you shame yourself for being judged.” Her current exhibition centers on “The Moon is Wet,” connecting three women across time: the sea goddess Mazu, historical “Ma Jie” domestic workers who took vows of celibacy, and present-day Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore. She calls the work “a portal through which stories flow,” a way to interpret Singapore. When she told me about meeting the Ma Jie women in their 80s and 90s, I could hear the admiration in her voice: “They were so radical… they took this vow of celibacy, right? In the nation-building narrative, they were just portrayed as hard-working laborers who were frugal and gave back to the nation... but never really about these desires that they might have had.” Her work speculates on their interiority, their relationships, their alternative forms of kinship, aspects systematically excluded from official histories.

Charmaine Poh, public solitude, 2022. Two-channel digital video, synthetic deepfake media, 4 min, Videostill. © Charmaine Poh

What’s remarkable is how she connects these forgotten histories to contemporary queer domestic workers. She mentioned meeting LGBTQ+ domestic workers who “identify as Pelangi, which is an Indonesian word for a rainbow.” Showing us alternative kinships from across time and space. “This creating this skin enabled me to speak back,” she explains. “The empathy actually comes from myself towards myself... when I began to look at my own body and my own self as a teenager with empathy, then I was able to create this superhero character to change the narrative.”

Left: Installation view of The Beginning of Everything, Images Courtesy of Paula Santomé. Right: Charmaine Poh, Installation view PalaisPopulaire 2025. The Moon is Wet, 2025. Three-channel digital video installation. 24’29”. Photo: Mathias Schormann. © Charmaine Poh

Perhaps most powerfully, both artists create space for voices that have been systematically silenced. Both artists understand that “found” material carries meaning. Paula with art historical imagery, Charmaine with archival footage and cultural memories. Both understand that lasting change doesn’t come from destroying everything and starting over, but from, as Paula puts it, “taking from what is already there… let’s change what is there. It’s clearly not working.” This approach feels particularly relevant right now. We’re living through a moment when the old stories are visibly failing, but the new ones haven’t been fully written yet.

For Charmaine, water became an artistic language almost unconsciously. “It started appearing as textures, and then it started appearing as a metaphor,” she notes. “I don’t work five years ahead of time... I work project by project.” Water’s “soft but persistent energy” now flows through her practice as a metaphor for everything from queer families to the spaces between cultures. Which is the same quality I see in Paula’s approach to dismantling mythological power structures.

When asked what disobedience means in contemporary terms, Santomé’s response reveals the broader political implications of both artists’ work: “It’s more like a knowledge of where the power structures that we live in now come from, how this has been built on control over female bodies... They’re afraid we’re gonna take power at some point. They want to keep the structure that has been there for over 2,000 years.”

Poh’s disobedience operates differently but toward similar ends. Her decision to be “playful” with her own archive, to laugh at herself while creating empowering narratives, represents what she calls a form of agency: “What is more powerful than working with your own archive and feeling that you could do anything with it?”

Walking through Berlin Art Week’s endless offerings, these two shows felt different, like blueprints for a different future. They remind us that the most powerful act of disobedience might simply be refusing to accept the stories we’ve been told about who deserves power and why. But about what Santomé calls working with “found images” and “found stories.” Poh’s approach is remarkably similar, though her “found material” spans centuries and cultures. Living between Berlin and Singapore has given her a perspective that allows her to draw regional migrant histories and situate her country within a larger constellation of things happening.