Lina Lapelytė. We Make Years Out of Hours

The first of May 2026 was the first regular opening day of this work — it had opened the evening before — and the start of Gallery Weekend Berlin; the museum stayed open until 10 pm.

Lina Lapelytė has covered the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof with some 400,000 wooden cubes across roughly 2,500 square metres. The material is not laid out as a finished image but reshaped continuously: twelve performers per shift, drawn from a considerably larger ensemble, stack, layer, and shift it into towers, architectures, and hill landscapes, and visitors join in. What stands in the morning stands differently by evening.

Sound accompanies the movement. The performers sing texts by fifteen authors, among them Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, Forugh Farrokhzad, Khalil Gibran, June Jordan, Ocean Vuong, and W. S. Merwin. Building, singing, and listening interlock; the museum describes the work as a living monument to time, care, and coexistence.

It is the second edition of the CHANEL Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof, curated by the museum's directors Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. Lapelytė, born in Kaunas in 1984, lives in Vilnius and London.

Five further temporary exhibitions were on that day: Shilpa Gupta's What Still Holds in the Kleihues Hall, Giulia Andreani's Sabotage, Saâdane Afif's Five Preludes, Petrit Halilaj's An Opera Out of Time in the Rieckhallen, and, in its final days, Annika Kahrs's OFF SCORE.