Lina Lapelytė Transforms Hamburger Bahnhof with CHANEL Culture Fund Commission

Lithuanian artist and composer Lina Lapelytė presents "We Make Years Out of Hours" at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, opening May 1 and running through January 10, 2027. The exhibition, the second annual CHANEL Culture Fund commission, is included in the museum's Berlin Art Week programme this September. Hundreds of thousands of small untreated wooden cubes, sourced from a Lithuanian industrial monoculture forest, are stacked, scattered, dismantled, and rebuilt by visitors and 24 performers who sing fragments of poetry, breath, and song. The work unfolds over several months without a fixed form, creating what Lapelytė describes as a scaled-down version of society and a living social choreography. Benches designed by Mantas Peteraitis's architecture studio invite contemplation. Lapelytė, a Golden Lion winner with collaborators Vaiva Grainytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė for the opera "Sun & Sea" (2019), discusses impermanence, collective authorship, and listening in an interview with Whitewall. The wood will travel to another public artwork after the show. Field recordings by Peter Cusack and co-composed soundtracks with Daniel Bürkner contribute to the soundscape. Lapelytė frames the work as a response to war, misogyny, and abuses of language, offering time as a place of contemplation and resistance.