Out of Season

Klosterruine, Berlin

On hot days, the exhibition embodies everything a garden should be: an open light-filled space that invites shared conversation and quiet rest. A garden—if not for the absence of soil, plant life, trees, or an enclosed fence, aside from the ruins of a cloister that trace the perimeter.

Out of Season is an exhibition by Berlin-based artist Shirin Sabahi reconsidering what constitutes a garden, a paradise, or a refuge in public space. Installed within Klosterruine, a Franciscan monastery in Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood that was destroyed during WWII and is now repurposed as a cultural venue, the exhibition distills a garden to its essentials. It is a place to sit, to gather, and to reconnect with the elements, but ultimately it resists any literal garden making. Close to the spot where food and herbs might have grown some five hundred years ago in the cloister’s inner yard, Sabahi chooses to cultivate otherwise. Her sculptures, freed from their natural functions, are repurposed to fulfill alternative needs. Water becomes a pleasure fountain. Wind becomes sound. Flowers become glass adornments. In this way, the exhibition itself is out of season—like some fruit bred for seedless consumption, or a summer that has stretched beyond its time.

Sabahi’s practice investigates built environments through their materials, meanings, and shifting contexts. Blending layered histories, her exhibition at Klosterruine responds directly to the top-down forces shaping Mitte’s gentrification and commercial development. By revisiting ancient ideas as tools for navigating the present, she re-centers the neighborhood through vernacular, community-responsive gestures. Here, human presence—not economic logic—drives form, and functionality begins to take on new, adaptive shapes.

At the center of the open brick ruin, surrounded by Sabahi’s other sculptures, stands a fountain that is distinctly different from those in the city’s other public spaces—first, in its aesthetic simplicity, and second, in its renewed focus on functionality. Fabled Bowl I: Fountain of Zero Graces, Howz in Manganese Blue (2023) draws on the howz—a residential and public element seen in Persian architecture since pre-Islamic Iran. Sabahi’s hexagonal basin, symmetrical and elevated, sends out ribbons of water. Showing no figurative elements, the work bears the subtitle Zero Graces, signaling a deliberate refusal of the sculptural symbolism characteristic of cities like Berlin, from Prussian equestrian statues to figurative fountains. Instead, the installation invokes the aniconic sensibilities of Islamic visual culture, where form, material, and repetition are used without human figuration.

Still, the bowl feels elegiac. Its deep manganese blue recalls the hues often found in late 20th-century depictions of the sky, symbolic of infinity. Its title, Fabled Bowl, further strengthens it as a vessel for myth or memory, either tangible or imagined. In Garden Play, a performance by Bela Shayevich and Kristijonas Bartkus on July 20, 2023, Sabahi’s howz held and cooled melons and other fruit. Historically, howz served practical purposes beyond just a place of gathering, like keeping fruit cool in heat, or for shallow bathing. To conclude the performance, fruit was distributed to the audience—merging ritual, refreshment, and reenactment, while offering a gesture of communal comfort in anticipation of the ever-warmer summer.

In general, cities, built of stone, steel, and speed, are poorly suited to rising heat. Concrete holds the sun long after it sets, and green spaces are disappearing with development. In this context, Windcatcher (Geisterharfe) (2023) draws on the form of the traditional windcatcher, another cooling and reflective architectural element, offering a structure worth revisiting in times of environmental crisis. Formally, Sabahi’s sculpture deconstructs and reimagines the windcatcher—a tower-like structure dating back to the 13th century, originally designed for natural ventilation in North Africa and West Asia. When activated by a breeze, her Windcatcher emits faint, spectral sounds. Ambient, ephemeral and almost dystopian, the sculpture also reflects the Klosterruine by nodding to Gothic gardens’ wind harps. The subtitle Geisterharfe, meaning “ghostly harp” in German, captures its haunting presence as a structure that listens as much as it whistles, resonating architectural memory and environmental precarity.

Visible from every angle and installed in the transept of the Klosterruine, where shattered glass once marked the blast of a bomb, Sabahi has arranged twenty-five impossible flowers; impossible because they rise from stainless steel stalks on a brick garden bed, blossoms bursting with splashes of vibrant glass. Cuttings #1–25 (2023) evoke both ornamental garden stakes and botanical specimens, with their title suggesting they are 'cut' directly from nature. Towering and eternally pristine, they defy natural temporality—always out of season because they will never belong to any season. Industrial hybrids, they are excessive, fragile, and meticulously crafted. One might argue they are even out of fashion, kitschy. Their materiality recalls the 19th-century glass models of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, whose intricate reproductions of marine life and plants were driven by both scientific inquiry and aesthetic obsession. Yet while the Blaschka brothers pursued faithful mimicry, Sabahi’s sculptures meditate instead on humanity’s desire to suspend nature in time, reimagining the organic through artifice and longing.

In this way, Cuttings connects to Elizabeth Meyer’s ideas in Sustaining Beauty: The Performance of Appearance, where beauty is not fixed but active—able to hold our attention and prompt ethical reflection. These glass flowers, though still, seem strangely alive. Their bold shapes, colors, and shadows draw us in, even as they clearly appear artificial. This suggests that the effort to preserve beauty can also question and reflect on environmental loss. In this sense, the work presents a kind of afterlife—a lasting aesthetic presence in the face of ecological fragility.

Sabahi has also produced ephemera for the exhibition titled Turf Fan (2023), an edition of paper fans painted with grass pigment. As a substitute for real grass, due to the heat and lack of soil, the paint is usually applied in water-scarce regions as an aesthetic fix. Functioning as a portable climate tool, the fans feature quotes that highlight the artificial preservation of “nature” for appearances and question the shelf life of objects, gestures, and cultural formats like the garden show. Staged against a warming summer, the fans, much like the flowers, continue playing with this idea of what might remain.

This necessity for adaptation and longevity branches into Sabahi’s Buga Chairs (2023). Refurbished chairs originally designed for the 2005 Federal Garden Show in Munich, these functional objects were found discarded in a Bavarian beer garden and given new life, much like the Klosterruine and the sculptures Sabahi has altered for it. Mobile objects of rest, the chairs are reinserted into a space defined by ruins and remnants. Where top-down approaches aim to build anew—often efficiently but homogeneously—Sabahi instead folds the past into the present, reintroducing near-forgotten ideas while repurposing materials with deliberate care.

Grounded in critical reflection and audience engagement, Sabahi fills the space with objects that feel deliberately out of time or out of place. Cultural motifs are lifted from their original contexts, and design elements are untethered from their histories and rituals. In Out of Season, this purposeful displacement becomes a method of inquiry—asking what happens to meaning when form is removed from context. Does meaning persist, evolve, or disappear within our shifting relationships to nature, history, and urban life? By reducing the garden to both symbol and sensory experience, Sabahi adapts the garden into one founded on endurance.

As Derek Jarman prompts in one of the literary quotations inscribed on a Turf Fan’s handle, “Each park dreams of Paradise.” Sabahi’s exhibition invites us to dream too—of gardens that outlast the seasons, where memory, play, and resilience entwine in the face of the eternal summer.

- Nina Hanz

On hot days, the exhibition embodies everything a garden should be: an open light-filled space that invites shared conversation and quiet rest. A garden—if not for the absence of soil, plant life, trees, or an enclosed fence, aside from the ruins of a cloister that trace the perimeter.

Out of Season is an exhibition by Berlin-based artist Shirin Sabahi reconsidering what constitutes a garden, a paradise, or a refuge in public space. Installed within Klosterruine, a Franciscan monastery in Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood that was destroyed during WWII and is now repurposed as a cultural venue, the exhibition distills a garden to its essentials. It is a place to sit, to gather, and to reconnect with the elements, but ultimately it resists any literal garden making. Close to the spot where food and herbs might have grown some five hundred years ago in the cloister’s inner yard, Sabahi chooses to cultivate otherwise. Her sculptures, freed from their natural functions, are repurposed to fulfill alternative needs. Water becomes a pleasure fountain. Wind becomes sound. Flowers become glass adornments. In this way, the exhibition itself is out of season—like some fruit bred for seedless consumption, or a summer that has stretched beyond its time.

Sabahi’s practice investigates built environments through their materials, meanings, and shifting contexts. Blending layered histories, her exhibition at Klosterruine responds directly to the top-down forces shaping Mitte’s gentrification and commercial development. By revisiting ancient ideas as tools for navigating the present, she re-centers the neighborhood through vernacular, community-responsive gestures. Here, human presence—not economic logic—drives form, and functionality begins to take on new, adaptive shapes.

At the center of the open brick ruin, surrounded by Sabahi’s other sculptures, stands a fountain that is distinctly different from those in the city’s other public spaces—first, in its aesthetic simplicity, and second, in its renewed focus on functionality. Fabled Bowl I: Fountain of Zero Graces, Howz in Manganese Blue (2023) draws on the howz—a residential and public element seen in Persian architecture since pre-Islamic Iran. Sabahi’s hexagonal basin, symmetrical and elevated, sends out ribbons of water. Showing no figurative elements, the work bears the subtitle Zero Graces, signaling a deliberate refusal of the sculptural symbolism characteristic of cities like Berlin, from Prussian equestrian statues to figurative fountains. Instead, the installation invokes the aniconic sensibilities of Islamic visual culture, where form, material, and repetition are used without human figuration.

Still, the bowl feels elegiac. Its deep manganese blue recalls the hues often found in late 20th-century depictions of the sky, symbolic of infinity. Its title, Fabled Bowl, further strengthens it as a vessel for myth or memory, either tangible or imagined. In Garden Play, a performance by Bela Shayevich and Kristijonas Bartkus on July 20, 2023, Sabahi’s howz held and cooled melons and other fruit. Historically, howz served practical purposes beyond just a place of gathering, like keeping fruit cool in heat, or for shallow bathing. To conclude the performance, fruit was distributed to the audience—merging ritual, refreshment, and reenactment, while offering a gesture of communal comfort in anticipation of the ever-warmer summer.

In general, cities, built of stone, steel, and speed, are poorly suited to rising heat. Concrete holds the sun long after it sets, and green spaces are disappearing with development. In this context, Windcatcher (Geisterharfe) (2023) draws on the form of the traditional windcatcher, another cooling and reflective architectural element, offering a structure worth revisiting in times of environmental crisis. Formally, Sabahi’s sculpture deconstructs and reimagines the windcatcher—a tower-like structure dating back to the 13th century, originally designed for natural ventilation in North Africa and West Asia. When activated by a breeze, her Windcatcher emits faint, spectral sounds. Ambient, ephemeral and almost dystopian, the sculpture also reflects the Klosterruine by nodding to Gothic gardens’ wind harps. The subtitle Geisterharfe, meaning “ghostly harp” in German, captures its haunting presence as a structure that listens as much as it whistles, resonating architectural memory and environmental precarity.

Visible from every angle and installed in the transept of the Klosterruine, where shattered glass once marked the blast of a bomb, Sabahi has arranged twenty-five impossible flowers; impossible because they rise from stainless steel stalks on a brick garden bed, blossoms bursting with splashes of vibrant glass. Cuttings #1–25 (2023) evoke both ornamental garden stakes and botanical specimens, with their title suggesting they are 'cut' directly from nature. Towering and eternally pristine, they defy natural temporality—always out of season because they will never belong to any season. Industrial hybrids, they are excessive, fragile, and meticulously crafted. One might argue they are even out of fashion, kitschy. Their materiality recalls the 19th-century glass models of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, whose intricate reproductions of marine life and plants were driven by both scientific inquiry and aesthetic obsession. Yet while the Blaschka brothers pursued faithful mimicry, Sabahi’s sculptures meditate instead on humanity’s desire to suspend nature in time, reimagining the organic through artifice and longing.

In this way, Cuttings connects to Elizabeth Meyer’s ideas in Sustaining Beauty: The Performance of Appearance, where beauty is not fixed but active—able to hold our attention and prompt ethical reflection. These glass flowers, though still, seem strangely alive. Their bold shapes, colors, and shadows draw us in, even as they clearly appear artificial. This suggests that the effort to preserve beauty can also question and reflect on environmental loss. In this sense, the work presents a kind of afterlife—a lasting aesthetic presence in the face of ecological fragility.

Sabahi has also produced ephemera for the exhibition titled Turf Fan (2023), an edition of paper fans painted with grass pigment. As a substitute for real grass, due to the heat and lack of soil, the paint is usually applied in water-scarce regions as an aesthetic fix. Functioning as a portable climate tool, the fans feature quotes that highlight the artificial preservation of “nature” for appearances and question the shelf life of objects, gestures, and cultural formats like the garden show. Staged against a warming summer, the fans, much like the flowers, continue playing with this idea of what might remain.

This necessity for adaptation and longevity branches into Sabahi’s Buga Chairs (2023). Refurbished chairs originally designed for the 2005 Federal Garden Show in Munich, these functional objects were found discarded in a Bavarian beer garden and given new life, much like the Klosterruine and the sculptures Sabahi has altered for it. Mobile objects of rest, the chairs are reinserted into a space defined by ruins and remnants. Where top-down approaches aim to build anew—often efficiently but homogeneously—Sabahi instead folds the past into the present, reintroducing near-forgotten ideas while repurposing materials with deliberate care.

Grounded in critical reflection and audience engagement, Sabahi fills the space with objects that feel deliberately out of time or out of place. Cultural motifs are lifted from their original contexts, and design elements are untethered from their histories and rituals. In Out of Season, this purposeful displacement becomes a method of inquiry—asking what happens to meaning when form is removed from context. Does meaning persist, evolve, or disappear within our shifting relationships to nature, history, and urban life? By reducing the garden to both symbol and sensory experience, Sabahi adapts the garden into one founded on endurance.

As Derek Jarman prompts in one of the literary quotations inscribed on a Turf Fan’s handle, “Each park dreams of Paradise.” Sabahi’s exhibition invites us to dream too—of gardens that outlast the seasons, where memory, play, and resilience entwine in the face of the eternal summer.

- Nina Hanz

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