Brazilian Contemporary Art, Migration and Belonging at Bardo Projektraum, Berlin

August 6–20, 2026
Opening: August 6, 2026, 19:00–21:30

Bardo Projektraum
Jessnerstraße 33
10247 Berlin

Karne Kunst presents LAR – Home ist nicht nur ein Ort, an exhibition by Brazilian artists Elisa Carreno and Vanessa Neuber at Bardo Projektraum, Berlin.

Bringing together painting, collage, embroidery, photography, assemblage and participatory installation, LAR examines how the idea of home is carried, transformed and reconstructed through migration.

The exhibition begins with a deceptively simple question: When does a place of residence become home?

For those living between languages, territories and cultural references, home is rarely limited to a fixed geographical location. It can emerge through memory, bodily gestures, relationships, domestic objects, food, friendship and the everyday rituals that offer continuity across distance.

Rooted in the artists’ experiences as Brazilian women living in Berlin, LAR approaches migration through an intimate and sensory perspective. Rather than presenting displacement solely as rupture or loss, the exhibition looks at the practices through which people create familiarity, protection and belonging in new surroundings.

Curated by Vanessa Neuber, the exhibition contributes to an ongoing conversation around migration, memory and Latin American art in Berlin, creating a space in which personal histories connect with broader diasporic experiences.

About the Exhibition

The Portuguese word lar refers to home, but its meaning extends beyond the physical structure of a house. It suggests an inhabited space shaped by affection, familiarity, memory and human presence.

In LAR – Home ist nicht nur ein Ort, home is understood as something continuously assembled. It is created through the objects we preserve, the people we contact, the languages we speak, the meals we share and the gestures we repeat. It can offer comfort, but it can also contain absence, vulnerability and unresolved memories.

The exhibition developed through an empirical and collaborative process in which Elisa Carreno and Vanessa Neuber used their own experiences, emotions and questions as a starting point. These personal narratives intersect with other migratory trajectories encountered throughout their lives.

The resulting exhibition is not a single definition of home. Instead, it proposes a constellation of spaces, materials and actions through which visitors can consider their own relationship to belonging.

From Migration to Material Experience

The exhibition opens with Migration Patchwork, an installation connecting the trajectories of the two artists through fragments associated with migration. The work introduces the exhibition’s central understanding of identity as something composed from discontinuous experiences, cultural traces and emotional attachments.

A cocoon is a temporary home with neither doors nor windows draws on childhood memories and a decorative object familiar from Brazilian domestic environments. The cocoon becomes both shelter and transitional space: a structure that protects while anticipating transformation.

In Cabana, the artists return to the childhood gesture of building an improvised refuge. The installation transforms an intimate form of play into a shared environment, inviting visitors to enter a space associated with safety, imagination and temporary withdrawal.

Amiga, did you get home safely? addresses friendship, vulnerability and care between women. Its title recalls a familiar question exchanged after a meeting or a night out, but also carries the weight of danger, responsibility and collective protection.

The importance of physical contact appears in U(A)mar.mungen, a work whose title brings together linguistic and emotional associations with embracing, loving and the visceral human need for proximity.

The participatory installation Soft Resilience initially communicates softness and comfort. Yet its material and emotional associations remain open, allowing visitors to contribute their own interpretations and experiences.

Finally, Help yourself! draws on memories of celebration, food and hospitality. The work imagines the possibility of gathering people around a shared table, transforming sweetness and festivity into forms of cultural and emotional connection.

Across these works, materiality becomes a vehicle for memory. Fabric, paper, images, colour, found objects and handmade forms carry traces of places, relationships and experiences that cannot always be expressed through language.

An Intimate and Participatory Exhibition

LAR invites visitors not only to observe, but also to inhabit, touch, remember and respond.

Its curatorial approach is intimate without becoming private or closed. The artists’ individual histories function as points of departure for larger questions concerning migration, cultural memory, displacement and the reconstruction of identity.

Home appears throughout the exhibition as both a personal need and a collective possibility. It may be found in a childhood structure, an embrace, a postcard, a shared song or a temporary gathering among strangers.

By transforming Bardo Projektraum into a welcoming and participatory environment, the exhibition asks whether art itself can become a provisional home: a place in which experiences are recognized, relationships are formed and unfamiliar surroundings begin to acquire meaning.

Artists

Elisa Carreno

Elisa Carreno is a Brazilian artist and curator whose practice begins with emotions and experiences that are often difficult to articulate through words.

Working across painting, collage and installation, she explores sensory memory, cultural traces, repetition and everyday rituals. Her intuitive process allows materials, colours and forms to guide the development of each work.

References to her Brazilian background emerge through vivid colour, abstraction and organic forms associated with tropical flora. Carreno uses materiality to create sensory and emotional encounters, inviting viewers to recognize feelings of familiarity, joy, vulnerability and connection within her compositions.

Website: elisacarreno.com
Instagram: @elisacarreno

Vanessa Neuber

Vanessa Neuber is a Brazilian interdisciplinary artist and curator based in Berlin. Her practice moves between collage, installation, artist’s books, painting, poetry and video.

With a background in design, art history and analytical psychology, she approaches artistic creation as a form of self-knowledge and transformation. Her work creates connections between word and image, the visible and the hidden, and the dreamlike and the everyday.

Neuber frequently works with discarded and unconventional materials, transforming ordinary objects into symbolic forms. Her artistic and curatorial research engages with belonging, migration, feminism, mindfulness, sustainability, mythology, philosophy and impermanence.

Through her practice, she invites viewers to reconsider what appears familiar and to experience art as a living and transformative material.

Website: vanessaneuber.com
Instagram: @neuber.art

Public Programme

Opening: LAR – Home ist nicht nur ein Ort

Thursday, August 6, 2026
19:00–21:30

Opening of the exhibition with artists Elisa Carreno and Vanessa Neuber at Bardo Projektraum.

Femia x Migra: Miniatures

Friday, August 7, 2026
18:00–20:30

A hands-on miniature workshop inviting participants to create a tiny door as a portal, memory, refuge or entrance to an imagined world.

ALOCOR #1: Flor Bobadilla Oliva

Thursday, August 13, 2026
Doors: 19:00 · Concert: 19:30

A live performance by Argentine singer and actress Flor Bobadilla Oliva, followed by a collective listening session dedicated to music by FLINTA composers and performers from the Global South.

Sensitive Collage: Mapping Memories

Friday, August 14, 2026
18:00–21:00

Led by Vanessa Neuber, this workshop combines collage and meditation to create visual maps of memory, emotion and belonging.

Postcard Collage Workshop

Wednesday, August 19, 2026
18:00–21:00

Led by Elisa Carreno, the workshop explores postcards as gestures of care, remembrance and affective connection across physical or emotional distance.

Visit

Bardo Projektraum
Jessnerstraße 33
10247 Berlin

Exhibition: August 6–20, 2026
Opening: August 6, 19:00–21:30

Opening hours:
Wednesday to Saturday
14:00–18:00

The exhibition can also be visited during the accompanying programme and by appointment.

Latin American Art and Brazilian Diasporic Practices in Berlin

LAR forms part of Karne Kunst’s sustained work with Latin American and Caribbean artists, curators and cultural workers in Berlin.

The exhibition approaches Brazilian contemporary art not as a homogeneous national category, but through situated experiences of migration, materiality, memory and diasporic belonging. Carreno and Neuber develop distinct visual languages while sharing an interest in the emotional and sensory processes through which people construct a relationship to place.

Presented at Bardo Projektraum, LAR expands the visibility of Latin American art in Berlin while creating connections between Brazilian artistic practices and the city’s wider migrant and diasporic communities.

Through its exhibition and public programme, the project positions artistic practice as a space for reflection, encounter and the creation of new forms of belonging.

About Karne Kunst

Karne Kunst is a Berlin-based platform for contemporary art, artistic research and cultural production shaped by Latin American, Caribbean and diasporic perspectives.

Through exhibitions, residencies, publications, public programmes and international collaborations, Karne Kunst supports artists and cultural workers whose practices engage with migration, memory, bodies, territories, feminist thought and decolonial forms of knowledge.

About Bardo Projektraum

Bardo Projektraum is an independent contemporary art space in Berlin and the physical extension of Karne Kunst’s curatorial ecosystem.

Its programme brings together exhibitions, artistic research, experimental formats and public encounters, with particular attention to migrant, diasporic, feminist and historically underrepresented artistic positions.

LAR – Home ist nicht nur ein Ort is a Berlin-based project by Karne Kunst gUG, presented at Bardo Projektraum under the artistic direction of Marcela Villanueva @realmarce. Supported by the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt des Landes Berlin and carried out at Bardo Projektraum, Berlin.