Above Ground Below

carlier | gebauer, Berlin, is pleased to announce Nida Sinnokrot’s solo exhibition, _Above Ground Below,_ with a public opening on Friday, 1 May 2026, 6–9 pm. During [Gallery Weekend Berlin](https://www.gallery-weekend-berlin.de/), the gallery will be open at the following times: Wednesday, 29 April to Sunday, 3 May, 11 am to 6 pm. _Above Ground Below_ unfolds as a field of relations organized across sky, ground and subterranean registers. Throughout the exhibition images, objects, texts, and materials form constellations that shift through aggregation, dispersal, and return as a set of relations between bodies, objects, infrastructures, and the forces that move through them. _The Constellation_ (2026) images introduce one register of this movement. In the original action, pigeons fitted with LED lights moved across the dusk sky above Jalazon refugee camp, producing shifting formations that follow a swarm logic. The emerging constellations remain adaptive and unfixed across multiple registers as framed photographs and as stacks of newsprint on the floor. The stacks extend the work, allowing the birds to leave the exhibition and circulate outward as a dispersed network. _Rubber Coated Rocks (RCR)_, initiated in 2001, is presented here in a 2024–26 iteration. The works draw on the form of the projectile: rubber-coated bullets. Composed of stones, discarded footballs, and other found materials gathered at checkpoints in Palestine, each sculpture binds together elements marked by circulation, impact, and abandonment. The forms recall heads or clustered bodies, worn, weathered, and held in tension, suggesting both vulnerability and persistence. Bound and stabilized, they stand as accumulations of contact between surface and force, object and memory, play and violence. Assembled from what is at hand, and elevated the aggregation of elements forms constellatory groupings that oscillate between the bodily and the architectural. _Water Witnesses_ (2025-2026) extends this inquiry into infrastructure, shifting from the projectile to the conduit. These sculptures assemble ceramic vessels, steel pipes, irrigation valves, and custom-cast fittings into upright configurations that evoke systems of flow, storage, and control. Drawing on vernacular water practices and the sacred geographies documented by Tawfiq Canaan, particularly his accounts of springs, wells, and cisterns as sites of belief, ritual, and guardianship, the works situate infrastructure within a broader cosmological framework. Canaan’s writings on amulets and protective devices inform the logic of assembly: materials are combined, bound, and suspended not only for function but for their capacity to mediate vulnerability and care. Within this field, the works operate as witnesses in the fullest sense of the term, where the Arabic shaheed carries both the meaning of martyr and witness. _Open Books_ (2026), texts by Tawfiq Canaan (1882–1964) and Gustaf Dalman (1855–1941), anchor the installation within an earlier moment of exchange between Palestine and Germany. Writing in the early twentieth century, Canaan, a Palestinian physician and ethnographer, and Dalman, a German theologian and orientalist scholar, documented everyday practices, sacred geographies, and systems of belief at a moment when rapid modernization threatened their erasure. Their work moved between field observation, correspondence, photography, and publication, forming an archive that continues to shape how Palestine has been studied and understood. Their pages, spread low across the ground, begin to resemble wings of birds, while also registering another form of circulation: the movement of knowledge through fieldwork, correspondence, publication, translation, and return. The books become part of the installation’s material field, positioned between archive and ground, text and body, sediment and flight. Presented together, these works trace a movement from impact to flow, from projectile to conduit, from flight to printed circulation, producing a cosmology grounded in resistance, care, and continued movement.