SANATORIUM presents Christiane Peschek’s solo exhibition PHOENIX CASTLE between the dates September 17 and October 31, 2026. PHOENIX CASTLE stands as a speculative world of purification and sedimentation from the perspective of Gaia as a living system in continuous transformation beyond human inhabitation. PHOENIX CASTLE is a post-apocalyptic, six-week-long playground that imagines a world beyond anthropocentrism, playfully stimulating a shift of perception toward a sensibility where transformation, matter, memory, and time are inseparable.
The Earth in its ongoing transformation is a sentient system, it absorbs loss, stores memory, shapes time, and generates life through endless cycles of emergence and decay. In PHOENIX CASTLE, Peschek uses geological processes as direct impulses for emotional processes like sedimentation, compression, rooting, erosion, smoke, ash, purification, and regeneration. Moving through the installation is a walk through a succession of these earth conditions, reminding us that we also embody all of these planetary processes within our individual and collective existence: storing, composting, fracturing, compressing, and beginning again. Peschek believes that this planetary consciousness can be translated into a micro-cosmos, developing an architecture that manifests in physical installations and expands through rituals, objects, and writing.
The exhibition takes its inspiration from the intrinsic relationship between human corporeality and planetary elements, organized across two floors as a physical and sensory transition. On the ground floor, visitors are invited to remove their shoes and perform a ritual purification with scented ashes before entering a contemplative space centered around a pit with a slowly burning incense forming the word “HUMAN”. Guided by a multi-channel soundscape, visitors ascend to the upper floor, where the environment shifts toward expanded states of earth consciousness.
In contrast to static gallery displays, PHOENIX CASTLE is a place of constant transformation and adaptation: an active cycle of twenty earth conditions that evolves week by week. Over the course of the five weeks, four paintings on the upper floor are continuously replaced to introduce the next phase of the cycle, allowing the exhibition to function as an emotional microclimate where "earthness" is physically experienced through the human body. The installation becomes an experimental field of mystical otherness with a deep sensory regeneration and a dissolution of solid physicality.
Accompanying the exhibition, a comprehensive monographic book Gaia Scripts documenting Christiane Peschek’s works, including the PHOENIX CASTLE installation, will be published by SANATORIUM and MOUSSE. Edited by Nadine Khalil, the publication features written contributions by Shumon Basar, Kate Brown, Peter Sit, and Marlene Wenger. A special book launch event will be held at the gallery during the exhibition's finissage.
About the artist:
Christiane Peschek is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice emerges from lived hybridity — sustained by an artificial heartbeat and shaped by a dependency on technology. Her work navigates the fragile states of identity in the extreme present, drawing on speculative fiction, cosmology and techno-shamanism, expanding towards new emotional architectures. Central to her work is the exploration of entanglements between corporeal, technological, and ecological systems. Through paintings, immersive installations, collective rituals and retreats she explores extreme environments and the emotional co-dependency between nature and technology. Impermanence, tenderness, exhaustion, and longing are amplified in her practice, transformed into experiences that invite collective resonance.
Her projects often unfold in cycles, weaving together theory, zeitgeist, aesthetics and collectiveness, situating the body as both fragile and augmented, deeply entangled with technological and ecological systems. With Moon Room – House of Contemporary Feeling, Peschek extends her practice into an experimental studio setting, facilitating processes that explore new modalities of feeling, care, and togetherness. Her works are part of major international collections, with exhibitions at Kunsthalle Erfurt, Museum MARTA Herford, Centre Culturel Suisse Paris, NRW Forum Düsseldorf, Benaki Museum Athens, Kunsthaus Graz, and gallery shows in London, Dubai, New York, Düsseldorf, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, and Berlin.
