Galerie Anton Janizewski presents Rebekka Benzenberg´s Dream Baby Dream

Save the date, Berlin, an ongoing exhibition till 21.06.2025! Exhaustion as an expression of resistance, depression as a silent but fundamental indictment of a sick system: in her exhibition Dream Baby Dream, Rebekka Benzenberg draws attention to questions that are only superficially personal and intimate. The motif of the bed is at the centre of her pointed, finely tuned compilation of sculptures, sound and paintings: a tempting retreat and a hated sickbed at the same time.

The bed – especially the unmade one – implies a body that tosses and turns in it, sweats and leaves traces of its presence behind. Artists such as Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois have established the bed as a cypher for the presence of female bodies and their sexual self-determination in contemporary art.

Benzenberg draws on these role models and their impulse to make the private public and thus political. The artist focuses on the body made invisible due to depression and isolation, and critically questions its pathologisation: a perspective that looks at social contexts as a whole and understands mental illness as described by the British revolutionary collective Red Therapy in the 1970s: „A major form of reaction, of our bodies’ rebellion, against capitalism”.

The market for psychotherapies is flooded with offers that specialise in the elimination of symptoms but do not identify and address systemic causes as such. Benzenberg’s work “Tell me what you know about dreams, dreams”, which attracts attention with its hypnotic light that wanders back and forth, is inspired by the approach of Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR for short), which is intended to support the therapy of traumatic experiences through guided eye movements and is used, among other things, for soldiers returning from war zones. Benzenberg makes it clear how technology specifically intervenes in cognitive processes and is intended to maintain productivity and perceived normal stress tolerance.

On the other hand, an unprecedented medialization and gamification of social life undermine precisely such efforts. The sound work “Or don’t you know what to look for?“ fills the exhibition space in an endless loop with sounds from the puzzle game Candy Crush: an app that, like many others, targets the brain’s reward system by releasing a little dopamine with every candy puzzle solved. This creates the illusion of an accomplished or fulfilling task, but due to the endless nature of the game, the risk of addiction should not be underestimated.

Text by Malte Lin-Kröger www.instagram.com/malte.lin.k
Find out more via antonjanizewski.com/rebekka-benzenberg-dream-baby-dream

Location: Galerie Anton Janizewski, Weydingerstraße 10, 10178 Berlin @antonjanizewski
Exhibition Photographer Julian Blum @exhibitiondocumentation

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Rebekka Benzenberg (*1990 in Duisburg) lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf. From 2013 to 2020, she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Sammlung Philara, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, as well as with Kadel Willborn, Martinetz, and Salon der Gegenwart.

She has been awarded grants from the Stiftung Kunstfonds, the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, and the Kunststiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen in support of her artistic practice.