Lina Lapelytė. 400,000 Cubes, Never Finished

Some 400,000 wooden cubes cover the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof, across roughly 2,500 square metres, and they are not meant to stay put. Twelve performers per shift, drawn from a considerably larger ensemble, stack them into towers, architectures and hill landscapes and move them again, so by evening the hall looks different. Visitors join in.

The performers also sing texts by 15 authors, among them Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, Forugh Farrokhzad, Khalil Gibran, June Jordan, Ocean Vuong and W. S. Merwin. The museum calls Lina Lapelytė's "We Make Years Out of Hours" a living monument to time, care and coexistence.

Even without the big words, the decision is a smart one. A hall this size tempts an artist to fill it with one large object. Lapelytė answers with hundreds of thousands of small ones that anyone can move. The catch is that if you come once, you see one state.

This is the second 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. The work opened the evening before 1 May 2026. That was its first regular day and also the start of Gallery Weekend Berlin, and the museum stayed open until 10pm. Five other temporary exhibitions were on: 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".

There isn't a single person in the museum's installation view, just mounds and low walls, a tower of cubes up front, tables and benches in between. For a work in which people build and sing for hours, that is the least fitting picture, because nothing in the hall stays that way.

Lina Lapelytė, "We Make Years Out of Hours". Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin.