With a cross-generational duet, Mahdad Alizadeh and Emil Schumacher question the here and now in our Showroom. The image of a common whale song is fitting for this. Why a whale song? Because, against all categorisation, these creatures are simply mammals in the sea. Although they need the air to breathe, they nevertheless live exclusively in a different element. This mascot of category refusal, pioneer in species extinction, embodiment of worldly humility is our inspiration to enter the exhibition sanctuary.

The Informal Master Emil Schumacher shows drawings selected by Mahdad Alizadeh. The guy born in Tehran in 1993, who came to Berlin to study, likes Emil, who was born in Hagen in 1912 and died in Ibiza in 1999, so much that a few of Emil's sheets are allowed to find refuge in the installation. Alizadeh changes the floor of the exhibition space and builds a rudimentary-looking exhibition architecture of 900 bricks on it, on which sculptures made of clay are placed in groups and standing alone. The installation is reminiscent of an infrastructure with baths and bakeries of ancient and ancient oriental excavation sites. The sculptures do not want to be described.

Serious but without authority, unknown forms meet familiar structures or vice versa, it is difficult to say. Sanctuary can be translated as both sanctuary and refuge. Through the title we seem to get an answer to all the questions that might arise in this space: here is a sanctuary. And at the same time it opens up the space for us to make associations and possibilities that move in the indescribable and invisible.

Emil Schumacher travelled to Libya and Tunisia in 1962 at the age of 50 in search of precisely this indescribable, alien, in order to integrate it into his work and thereby change it. Mahdad Alizadeh knows this too. His work seems to come from a laboratory of rituals, where experiences of the new and the familiar are explored.

Perhaps it is a search for universal trust. An important attitude in our society, which has to deal with the unknown and renegotiate its values. This requires new combinations and connections that can only be found together.