We Will Find a Solution – Three Positions in Dialogue

[Lars Schumacher]

We Will Find a Solution – Three Positions in Dialogue Kunstraum Reuter, Berlin 

In early July 2025, the Kunstraum Reuter in Berlin became the site of an unusual and courageous artistic experiment. Under the title We Will Find a Solution, the three artists Asma Ounine, Rainer Wieczorek and Lars Schumacher transformed the independent project space into an open laboratory, inviting visitors to participate directly in the creation, development and rethinking of artistic processes. Rather than presenting finished works, the exhibition unfolded as a collective Denkraum—a space where art, conversation and social interaction merged into a single, evolving field of experience.

For three days, from 4 to 6 July, the Kunstraum Reuter shifted away from the conventions of exhibition-making and embraced a participatory model that resonates strongly with Berlin’s tradition of artistic experimentation. The city, long known for its independent art scene and its willingness to challenge institutional norms, provided the ideal backdrop for a project that sought to dissolve the boundaries between artist, curator and audience. The Kunstraum Reuter itself, a space with a distinct focus on contemporary painting, Mail Art and transnational artistic exchange, offered the perfect environment for this exploration. Its position at the margins of the commercial art world allowed the exhibition to unfold with a freedom and openness that are increasingly rare in contemporary cultural institutions.

The three artists approached this shared experiment from different conceptual angles. Asma Ounine contributed a dialogical practice rooted in Mail Art, combining poetic miniatures and media-based reflections to open new channels of communication across borders. Her work treated correspondence as an artistic gesture of connection, care and resistance, echoing the long history of Mail Art as a democratic and transnational medium. Rainer Wieczorek presented his Quintessenzbilder, visual condensations of social realities that functioned as propositions for aesthetic clarity and civic imagination. His works, shaped by a Fluxus-informed sensibility, invited viewers to consider how images can become tools for democratic participation. Lars Schumacher, drawing on his extensive experience with social sculpture and conceptual art, created frameworks that encouraged visitors to engage directly with the artistic process. His contributions explored the porous boundary between everyday life and aesthetic form, positioning art as a situation rather than an object.

Throughout the exhibition, participation replaced presentation. During the daily opening hours, visitors were invited to leave traces, contribute ideas, and engage in spontaneous actions. The gallery became a site of impromptu readings, musical interventions, conversations with the artists, and collaborative creation. Collages, miniature sculptures, textual fragments and even transformed everyday objects emerged as part of a collective book project that grew organically over the course of the exhibition. These contributions were not treated as secondary or peripheral; they were integral to the evolving work, embodying the exhibition’s central idea that artistic meaning arises through shared engagement.

Mail Art, with its history of global exchange and anti-hierarchical ethos, played a subtle but important role in the exhibition’s conceptual framework. Its presence underscored the democratic impulse behind the project: the belief that art should circulate freely, invite participation and resist institutional gatekeeping. In the context of Berlin’s independent art scene, Mail Art becomes not only a medium but a metaphor for connection—an artistic language that thrives at the margins and celebrates the collaborative spirit that defined We Find a Solution.

The final day of the exhibition, 6 July, served as an open process finale. Visitors encountered the traces of the previous days: collaboratively created works, transformed objects, and the beginnings of a collective archive. The atmosphere was marked by curiosity, openness and the shared desire to understand art as a social process. The exhibition concluded not with a closing gesture, but with a celebration of what had emerged through collective action. The solution, as the artists and visitors discovered, lay not in the finished work but in the shared experience of making, thinking and transforming together.