Carsten Nicolai, the artist who also records electronic music as Alva Noto, shows new work at Galerie EIGEN + ART in Berlin from 12 November to 19 December 2026. The exhibition is about weaving: how a loom turns threads into a pattern in much the same way that code turns data into an image or a sound.
At its centre is the film WAVE WEAVE, shot in the workshops of HOSOO in Kyoto's Nishijin district. The company was founded in 1688 and still weaves textiles with highly specialised techniques, alongside digital processes. Nicolai's camera stays close to the looms, the threads and the repeated movements, and edits them into a rhythmic visual composition rather than a documentary.
What you will see
The soundtrack does double duty. Nicolai turned it into a sonogram, a graphic picture of the sound, and had that picture woven into a textile: SONO OBI. The fabric then appears in the film whose sound it records, so the image, the cloth and the music are literally woven together.
A second group of nine works goes back to Nicolai's childhood in Karl-Marx-Stadt, now Chemnitz, a city built on textile production and machine making. In the early 1990s he found a set of historical Jacquard pattern drawings in an abandoned weaving mill there. These gridded sheets were used to transfer patterns onto the punch cards that controlled the loom, half picture, half code. For adopted jacquard point paper drawing he combined seven of them with his own drawings from 2026.
If you know Nicolai's light and sound installations, or his long collaboration with the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose exhibition is currently at the Hamburger Bahnhof, this is a quieter, more handmade side of the same interest in patterns, interference and making sound visible.
Good to know
- Opening: Thursday 12 November, 5–8pm, free.
- Hours: Tuesday to Saturday 11am–6pm. Entry is free.
- Accessibility: the gallery is not step-free. Call 030 280 66 05 before your visit.
- Combine it with: the Sakamoto exhibition seeing sound, hearing time at the Hamburger Bahnhof, which runs until 20 June 2027.