Brainlab presents “Cerebral Vantage Points”, a new exhibition featuring works by contemporary artists Matthias Bitzer and Vusumzi Nkomo

Guided tours for the press and public 

Members of the press are cordially invited to attend a press tour of the exhibit on October 30th at 11 AM. If you would like to attend, please email culture.program@brainlab.com. There will also be a guided tour for the public with the artists on October 31st at 3 and 4  PM. Interested visitors can register at this link. 

Press images can be downloaded here. 

About the exhibition 

For this collaboration, the Brainlab Culture Program brought together Berlin-based artist Matthias Bitzer and Cape Town-based artist Vusumzi Nkomo to find common ground from the perspectives of the “Global North” and the “Global South”. During their encounters, however, they discovered a truth that went beyond the curatorial idea: unexpected closeness, carried by mutual curiosity, openness and a shared sense of play. Cerebral Vantage Points invites the audience to step into a living poem, one written in the language of dust, grain and gravity: immersive, non-hierarchical, non-linear, decentralized, multifaceted and heavily inspired by the spontaneous creative intuition of its artists. It is not a reflection on nostalgia or (dis)orderly playtime — it is an acknowledgment of the play that remains within the artists and their audience. 

Vusumzi Nkomo first came across Matthias Bitzer's practice years before they met, finding in it both inspiration and admiration. When they finally met in a Berlin studio, it exceeded the instrumental logic of cultural exchange. In close collaboration, the cultural practitioners embarked on an immersive experience on a large scale that encourages viewers to interpret meaning through motion, color, texture, rhythm, and spatial relationships, rather than literal narratives. Both approach the art of framing as a silent weapon that shapes perception, dictates meaning and determines which futures people can or cannot imagine. Together, repetition and seriality in both artists' works expose the cyclical nature of postcolonial economies, as well as the persistence of material and historical traces across various sites. 

The exhibition emphasizes circles, holes, black spots, and colorful balls. These form not only a bond between the artists and their audience but also provide a unique sensory experience akin to hitting the black ball in a game of pool. Depending on the timing of the strike, hitting the black ball could result in a win, a penalty or a loss. The recurring dots in both artists’ practices could sometimes be understood as a radical departure, sometimes as a place of comfort. Nkomo's Anxiogenic Black Spots (2023-ongoing), which echoed cannonballs of silence and resistance and marking worlds unmade by anti-Black design, came to play with Bitzer's roundness patterns that feel like safety: endless and whole. Black spots scar the maps of land and memory, where dispossession still grows behind white fences. In this exchange, they seem to speak with the colorful balls in Bitzer’s work, as if they were searching for the secrets they share. 

About the artists 

Matthias Bitzer (*1975) is a Berlin-based artist who studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe. His practice spans painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation. Moving between figuration and abstraction, Bitzer often references historical and fictional figures from literature, philosophy, and theater within fragmented, kaleidoscopic compositions. His work explores the intersections of reality and illusion, memory and identity, asking: What is truth? How are history, perception, and self constructed, and by whom? Through reflections, doublings, and architectural interventions, he creates multilayered spatial environments where time and narrative intertwine. His works are held in major collections including LACMA, MarTa Herford, and the Rosenblum Collection, and he has received awards such as the Otto Dix Prize and the Art Prize of the City of Nordhorn. 

Vusumzi Nkomo (*1993) is an artist, researcher, and curator based in Cape Town. With a background in journalism and Contemporary Arts (Cape Town Creative Academy), he creates multisensory works combining sculpture, installation, sound, and writing. His practice explores the intersections of art and politics, revealing hidden colonial histories and their continuities today. Through participatory and process-based approaches, Nkomo exposes how racialized economies and neoliberal systems persist, turning play and interaction into tools of resistance. Nkomo's work seeks new forms of resonance, community, and critical reflection. Recent residencies include Things Take Time (Cape Town, 2024) and the Brainlab Culture Program (Munich/Berlin, 2025). He has exhibited at institutions including the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Norval Foundation and published in ArtThrob, Contemporary And, and ESPACE art actuel. 

About the curators 

Samuel Baah Kortey is a multi-sensory artist, curator, and visual researcher whose practice interrogates memory, materiality, and the postcolonial condition. Engaging archives, everyday encounters, and motifs of death and decay, he reconfigures observation into critical acts that expose the residues of colonial modernity—a graduate of Städelschule, Frankfurt, and KNUST, Kumasi. Kortey is a current Comuse Research Fellow at the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, and a 2023 Villa Romana Fellow. Dividing his time between Berlin and Kumasi, he continues to develop a translocal artistic and curatorial practice attentive to the shifting narratives of African and diasporic modernities. He is a member of the collective blaxTARLINES and co-founder of the Asafo Black Collective. 

Maya Makeda Buhlmann is an Ethiopian-German art historian and researcher whose practice unfolds at the intersection of artistic research, exhibition-making, and decolonial inquiry. Her work engages with visual expressions of Africa and African diaspora, examining their entanglements within global art histories, while foregrounding local artistic practices and their socio-political resonances. Drawing on archives, field encounters, and institutional collaborations, she explores how art can act as a medium of cultural negotiation and collective memory. Buhlmann holds a B.A. in Cultural Work from the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Art History with a focus on Africa at Freie Universität Berlin. Her professional experience includes collaborations with institutions such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin Biennale, and the Goethe-Institut.