The exhibition The Real Magic of Magical Realism in Berlin has closed and entered the city’s shared cultural memory. It was the second exhibition to revisit the summer 2024 event, a performance never widely announced and witnessed only by several dozen participants and a few accidental passersby in the Rose Garden. Precisely because of this hidden character, its reappearances in exhibition form gain weight: they open a work once confined to a fleeting circle of witnesses into broader circulation. The first exhibition reflected on memory itself, on the fragile passage between collective remembrance and individual interpretation. The second created a bridge through Roman Ekimov’s photographic series and the improvisational drawings of Maya Ashinyants, extending the event into new artistic forms.
At the core stands the collective performance Die Traumträger (The Dream Keepers). I call it an immersive visualisation, for it is neither a closed composition nor a scripted theatre piece. I design the conditions, the symbols, and the spatial dramaturgy, but once the work begins the flow is no longer mine alone. Every participant, deliberate or incidental, adds gestures and perceptions that alter its course. The performance becomes a shared creation, unpredictable in detail yet coherent in spirit. On that hot summer evening in 2024 this openness gave rise to the vision of a white dragon appearing at sunset among the roses, a vision that dissolved as quickly as it emerged.
Ekimov’s photographs preserve this apparition while translating it into another register. They are not neutral records but acts of interpretation, citations of my work that acknowledge their source and assert their own presence. For any artist, such citation matters deeply. It inscribes a work into an aesthetic dialogue, amplifies its resonance, and situates it within a network of references that critics and curators read as markers of artistic seriousness. Ashinyants extends this dialogue further with her graphic improvisations. Through her drawings, the dragon shifts again, moving from memory into transformation, becoming less an image of the past than a figure of continuing invention.
This sequence of performance, photographic citation, and graphic improvisation shows how even a nearly hidden event can take root in cultural life. The first exhibition reflected on how memory oscillates between the collective and the personal. The second added the dimension of artistic dialogue across media. Together they reveal that the significance of an artwork does not depend on publicity but on its capacity to generate responses, to be remembered and reimagined beyond its immediate audience.
For me as the author, this process confirms that the vitality of a performance lies not in its singular occurrence but in its afterlives, in the ways it is cited, transformed, and shared across time. The Real Magic of Magical Realism offered one such afterlife, turning an intimate summer apparition into part of a broader cultural conversation. In this lies the true magic: that a vision once confined to a few witnesses can continue to unfold in new forms, long after the dragon has vanished into the dusk.
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