Heavy is the root of light

Artist talk: 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm CET | 11:30 to 12:30 am EST
Free admission to the exhibition: 5:00 pm CET
The meeting-link for online participation
For attendance at PalaisPopulaire, please register here.

Charmaine Poh is going to introduce the philosophical underpinnings of the solo exhibition, “Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take.” “Heavy is the root of light” is a line from the Daoist text, the Dao De Jing, and is quite symbolic of the seemingly contradicting imagery that the text is centred on. Yet rather than clashing oppositions, these oppositions are continual and recursive. Using this understanding, the artist will take the audience through the exhibition design and its works, looking at themes like technology, interdependence, time and being.

Charmaine Poh is an artist working across film, photography, media and performance. Her practice centers on narratives of agency, repair, and futurity, exploring the visibility and opacity of femininity and queerness in Southeast Asia. Poh studied Visual and Media Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin and is currently a PhD student of Prof. Annette Jael Lehmann at KMM also at FU Berlin and co-founder of the magazine Jom. 2025 Poh was awarded as the Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year” and the solo exhibition „Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take“ is currently on view at PalaisPopulaire (11.9.2025 – 23.2.2026).

This event is organized in cooperation with metaLAB (at) Berlin and PalaisPopulaire.

It is also worth staying a little longer. Afterwards, there is the Reading & Performance “feeling backwards, across tongues” by Logan February and ‘Silih Rangkul‘ by Bella & Dira (registration via PalaisPopulaire)