Hotels near Lina Lapelytė's We Make Years Out of Hours

Inside Hamburger Bahnhof, the Historic Hall had disappeared beneath 400,000 wooden cubes for Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė's We Make Years Out of Hours, the anchor commission of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026. Pine and spruce blocks stretched endlessly across the floor like an unfinished civilisation. Visitors and performers continuously rearranged the landscape, building towers, corridors, hills, and temporary monuments only for them to collapse again minutes later.

The work drew on poetry by Khalil Gibran, Etel Adnan, Mahmud Darwish, Ocean Vuong, and others, transformed into collective singing that moved slowly through the hall. The work resisted spectacle. In an era where contemporary art often screams in order to prove its relevance, Lapelytė's installation whispered. And because it whispered, people leaned closer.

At moments the installation resembled a city after collapse; at others, a playground; then suddenly, a sacred ritual. One photograph captured a man standing alone atop a mountain of wooden cubes speaking quietly on the phone, an almost absurdly contemporary image of modern isolation surrounded by collective material. Another frame revealed visitors throwing cubes into the air as if testing gravity itself. Elsewhere, carefully balanced towers leaned toward inevitable collapse, recalling both childhood construction games and the precariousness of political systems.

The title We Make Years Out of Hours lingered long after leaving the museum. It contains a deeply Eastern European understanding of time: that history is not built through grand declarations, but through accumulated endurance. Hours become years. Individuals become communities. Temporary gestures become history.

Pro Tip: The installation is a participatory work - visitors are invited to rearrange the cubes. Best visited during one of the performance hours when singers move through the hall. Photography is allowed, flash is not. Plan at least 90 minutes inside the Historic Hall.

Visual documentation by Dmitrijus Borisenka.