Pension ABC at CFA Berlin presents itself as a meditation on temporary interiors, but what it is really staging is a distinct poetic talent: the ability to make structural instability a vibe.
The exhibition takes its name from a West Berlin guesthouse that occupied an entire Bel Étage near Ku’damm — Berlin’s answer to Oxford Street. The historical reference is precise, rooting the show in a postwar moment when improvisation was a necessity, not a lifestyle choice.
Yet the pension itself is not exactly a historical relic. A quick Google reveals that it is actually still in operation, boasting a solid 3/5 stars on Tripadvisor and described by internet warriors, with a strange fondness, as “a sh1thole.” Curious about the distance between reference and reality, I called the pension and spoke with a snarky receptionist who has worked there for fifteen years. When I told him there was an art exhibition in Berlin about Pension ABC, he laughed and said I must have it confused with somewhere else. Asked whether the place was still populated by “travelling salesmen, artists, students, nurses, and other temporary residents,” he replied flatly: no — just tourists.
Breakfast, he added, costs €7, which, to be fair, is a bargain.
This brief exchange makes clear that while the exhibition and the pension share a name, they now occupy different conceptual worlds. The original owners, Golditza and Otto, have passed. The address has changed, the rights to the name perhaps sold. What remains as a slightly questionable place to sleep has been transformed, in the exhibition, as an atmospheric foray into transience. The gallery does not historicise the pension so much as abstract it — lifting provisionality out of use and into display.
That shift is immediately felt upon entry [to the exhibition]. The first thing I see is a pair of fingers where a doorknob should be. Peace is a patinated bronze sculpture first created by Angelika Loderer for Parallel Vienna, but retrofitted onto the ornate escutcheon of the gallery’s interior door. Turning the knob transforms a mundane gesture into an encounter with intimacy, making the politics of space legible through touch. The fingers themselves are wiry, long, and delicate: provisional digits that negotiate between durability and ephemerality but clearly highlight the sexiness of the latter.
Just beyond, Christian Jankowski’s fireplace sits inside a masonry heater that already existed in the room, the type scattered throughout many still-unrenovated, prewar, or Altbau, Berlin flats. A small screen plays flames on a loop from inside the ceramic hearth, offering endless spectacle but no real heat. The works highlight how provisional interiors are aestheticised: security and warmth are offered as aura points, but not necessarily as lived experience.
It is precisely this sensibility — the ability to make instability not only liveable but actually seductive — that many works in the exhibition take up directly. Caroline Achaintre’s tufted wool tapestries push the psychology of space toward excess, and manage to make thread feel raunchy. Wool, familiar and bodily, becomes a charged, non-neutral material oscillating between attraction and repulsion, comfort and grotesquery, like the less-than-laundered linens in the “toilet down the hall.”
Drawing on animal forms, carnival imagery, and science fiction, the works operate like Rorschach tests, facilitating projection but resisting concrete categorisation. Within Pension ABC, they register as interiors overwhelmed by the self: spaces where identity multiplies rather than settles, and familiarity tips into unease.
Still, all these references point in the same direction without fully being named. Pensions, hospitals, schools, and hotels appear throughout the exhibition, yet their shared role as spaces that organise, monitor, and regulate people is never directly addressed. The curatorial text dances around ideas of thresholds and in-between states — everyone’s favourite “liminal spaces” — but largely sidesteps the question of who actually lives in these places: people priced out of permanent housing, displaced residents, or those cycling through short-term rentals. Even today, it’s damn near impossible to find an apartment to rent in Berlin.
Migration and displacement are notably absent, even as platforms like Airbnb and Wunderflats hollow out neighbourhoods and turn lived-in homes into temporary backdrops for visitors. Transience becomes a look and a feeling, while the economic and social forces that produce it fade quietly out of view.
Moments of tension do emerge. Travis MacDonald’s Greetings, two figures poised at the threshold between darkness outside and light inside, makes obligatory social navigation (not to mention the matter of payment) legible: entering the space requires adjustment, as one version of the self must conform to norms of visibility and acceptability. Cosima zu Knyphausen situates provisionality in adolescence, exploring boarding school interiors where intimacy and discipline coexist under supervision and constraint.
Anna Virnich’s textile-based tableaus treat fabrics as translucent membranes, echoing the thin walls and porous boundaries of a pension or low-income housing. Bodies press, leave traces, and test limits; friction is visible, and permeability is charged, loud, and imposed. Oscillating between symbolic exoticism and precise construction, her works materialise the subtle violence of inhabiting provisional interiors, where intimacy and exposure coexist.
Together, these works underscore that provisional interiors are not neutral: they are sites where exposure, surveillance, and social codes intersect, revealing the subtle pressures that govern presence and movement. In Germany, this is not only psychological or intellectual but a social condition of access. Yet the exhibition stops short of asking who designs such spaces or who is expected to occupy them.
Rooms that were never meant to last acquire a peculiar elegance; walls too thin become ambience, and those living in them become part of the furniture. Instability becomes enticing, but only at a distance — felt, observed, and aestheticised precisely because it doesn’t need to be endured. In this way, the exhibition exposes one of the greatest discrepancies between art that is institutionalised and art that is lived with: nobody has to live in the gallery, and for the most part, it is not all that comfortable there.
This sensibility has deep roots: from postwar improvisation to Bauhaus modularity and modernist experimentation, impermanence and in-between states have long been treated as sites for contemplation, formal exploration, and aesthetic reflection. Instability, once a fact of everyday life, became something to be sensed, observed, and even admired as if the fleeting, fragmentary quality of space carried its own special weight.
Pension ABC is at its strongest when discomfort remains unresolved. Its weakness lies in its reluctance to confront the present directly. Germany appears here as history, mood, and memory — but not as an active agent: administering housing shortages, regulating borders, or producing rooms never meant to be lived in long-term. The exhibition offers a compelling vision of transience, but it leaves unanswered the central question: why so many people are still being forced to live inside it.
In any case, if you’re looking for a cheap breakfast in Berlin, or a retrospective meditation on temporary living, now you know where to go — just don’t get them mixed up.
Pension ABC 17th January – 28th February 2026 CFA Berlin
Exhibited artists: Caroline Achaintre, Zuzanna Bartoszek, Christa Dichgans, Nan Goldin, Christian Jankowski, Angelika Loderer, Sarah Lucas, Travis MacDonald, Dana Schutz, Emily Mae Smith, Gert & Uwe Tobias, Anna Virnich, Cosima zu Knyphausen
