Esther Schipper Berlin is pleased to present Repose, a solo exhibition by Belgian artist David Claerbout, marking his second with the gallery. The exhibition focuses on four major video works shown for the first time in Berlin: Birdcage (2023), Backwards Growing Tree (2023), The woodcarver and the forest (2025), and Eagle Eye (2026). Brought together in a darkened space, these video installations are accompanied by a number of works on paper that illuminate the artist’s production process. All films on view fundamentally question our relationship to nature and the way we have learned to perceive the world around us. In The woodcarver and the forest, the focus is on the almost meditative actions of a woodcarver whittling down wooden blocks to create one spoon after another; however, this tranquil process of production comes at a heavy cost, as the forest outside his window is slowly reduced to the very objects he creates. Birdcage portrays the lush, peaceful gardens of a stately home, which are suddenly shattered by a violent eruption, shifting both the atmosphere of the image and the viewer’s state of mind from apparent peace to intense tension and fear. In Eagle Eye, a bald eagle the universal symbol of strength and freedom is depicted lying awake but completely immobilized on an operating table, reversing our deeply ingrained associations with this predatory bird. By combining found footage, CGI, and generative AI, the artist brings the computational and the organic together, blurring the boundary between a living creature that observes and a model that has learned to observe. Backwards Growing Tree presents a portrait of the background itself, featuring a solitary tree in the Italian countryside digitally reconstructed and observed over five years; it disrupts the viewer’s sense of time by reversing the tree’s natural growth, a reversal that only becomes apparent over time and reveals the eye’s apparent blindness to the passage of time in nature, thus exposing the nature of perception itself.

Repose continues the artist’s long-standing engagement with time and duration. Three of the works Eagle eye, The woodcarver and the forest, and Backwards Growing Tree unfold over extreme durations, lasting several hours or even several years. Introducing a real-time component, these durations align the passage of film time with that of the visitor. In doing so, Claerbout brings film time closer to biological time- time that unfolds at the pace of living processes and largely escapes our notice. This uneventful, psychologically inefficient film time offers little for the eye to grasp and runs counter to our contemporary visual culture, which conditions us to constantly seek stimulation and reward.

The drawings on view are not independent of the video works; rather, they form an integral part of them. As a core element of the artist’s practice, a small number of drawings accompany each project, functioning as a mix of preparatory studies, notes from the production process, and more conceptual reflections. They are not simply sketches for the films, but a way of thinking through them, translating the complexity and temporality of the video works onto paper through light and color studies alongside techniques of sequencing and montage.

Rather than partaking in a romanticized idea of nature, the exhibition fundamentally questions our way of seeing the world around us. Inverting the standard order of what catches our attention and what is considered background, Claerbout invites us to focus on what usually remains peripheral or tuned out in human vision. Instead of concentrating on a single event, the viewer experiences multiple processes at once. Challenging the single, fixed gaze of the camera, this approach approximates a way of seeing that is more attuned to our physiology and our being in the world; human perception is never singular, but emerges through contesting sensations perceived by two eyes, two ears, and two hemispheres, resulting in countless impressions that together offer multiple ways of encountering the world. Through the effect of hyperreality created with the help of technology, Repose invites the audience to contemplate scenes of both destruction and regeneration, potential danger and enduring beauty. Suggesting an awareness of their status as representations, Claerbout’s images a theme that characterized the artist’s oeuvre long before digital and AI-generated images became ubiquitous alert viewers to the uncertain boundaries between the technical and the organic, between artifice and nature. To Claerbout, our perception lives precisely at the intersection of these realms, in the constant negotiation of what we see and what we believe.

Exhibition view: David Claerbout, Repose, Esther Schipper, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/ Paris/Seoul. Photo © Andrea Rossetti. David Claerbout © VG BildKunst, Bonn, 2026