In a collaborative exhibition by Société and Hauser & Wirth, opening on 10 September 2025 during Berlin Art Week at Société’s Charlottenburg gallery, ‘States of Being’ assembles works by thirty artists.

Ranging from emerging voices to canonical positions, the exhibition showcases artists across both galleries’ programmes, including Nairy Baghramian, Darren Bader, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Tina Braegger, Trisha Baga, Lee Bul, Petra Cortright, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Salim Green, Camille Henrot, Rashid Johnson, Lee Lozano, Glenn Ligon, Conny Maier, Jeanette Mundt, Wynnie Mynerva, Kaspar Müller, Thomas J Price, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, Bunny Rogers, George Rouy, Cindy Sherman, Marianna Simnett, Avery Singer, Timur Si-Qin, Alina Szapocznikow, Anh Trần and Lu Yang.

Operating along the fluid boundaries of physical, emotional, ecological, and spiritual states of being, the exhibition explores the shared complexities of the human condition through a cross-disciplinary, intergenerational lens. Seminal works from the 1960s and 1970s appear alongside contemporary works, drawing a conceptual through line that resonates with Maggie Nelson’s claim that “there is no single way to be alive. There is only being—again and again, differently.”

Some works gesture toward fleeting, elusive, and metamorphic states through abstraction and material transformation, while others evoke more permanent conditions shaped by legacy, ritual, or historical lineage. Together, these reflections expand beyond an anthropocentric prism to further include meditations on organic, extraterrestrial, and virtual modes of being, employing both biomorphic and synthetic forms to explore how existence is manifested across sentient and insentient life alike.

States of Being places particular emphasis on the performative, aesthetic, and affective strategies through which vulnerability, urges, desires, control, and dominance are expressed. The tender underbelly of the human experience is laid bare in the exhibition—at times whimsically, at times menacingly—through representations of the body and psyche that suggest there is never a singular state of being, but rather an ever-expanding space where values, norms, identity, perception, and imagination converge and clash.