Powerhouse Review by Sarah Lillig
The Residual Hum of Energy: On Nile Koetting’s powerhouse
When Nile Koetting’s exhibition powerhouse opened at the Gallery for Contemporary Art at E-WERK Freiburg, curated by Heidi Brunnschweiler, it did not announce itself with spectacle but with resonance. Although the exhibition has since closed, its vibration remains. The memory of it continues to hum, as though the architecture has retained a pulse, carrying the residue of its own activation.
In powerhouse, the industrial past of the E-WERK was not erased but reanimated. The artist treated the space as a living system, a site where electricity, sound, and air became materials of composition. Sensors responded to the visitor’s presence, faint movements punctuated stillness, and shifting light altered perception. The soundscape by MK Velsorf spread through the space like a current, subtle and enveloping, encouraging the listener to drift rather than to follow. Together, these elements created an experience that unfolded as atmosphere rather than narrative.
Koetting’s work often moves along the threshold between installation and performance, where technology becomes a sensorial rather than functional presence. In powerhouse, this sensitivity took on particular clarity. The viewer was absorbed into a field of relations, becoming part of an environment that seemed to perceive as much as it was perceived. Machines appeared sentient, air seemed intentional, and each surface reflected the delicate reciprocity of energy exchange.
The exhibition proposed a meditation on the nature of vitality itself. It asked how energy circulates between things, how it is sustained, and how it might be cared for rather than consumed. Its restraint was central to its effect. Rather than overwhelming, powerhouse invited a slower rhythm of looking and listening. It made room for attention to become a form of empathy. Within this quiet choreography, Koetting turned a building once devoted to industrial production into a site of poetic transformation.
To recall powerhouse now is to recall an ambience rather than a sequence of works. The installation offered a study of interdependence, of how the visible and invisible coexist. It was as much about what remained unseen as about what appeared, a meditation on systems that sustain life yet often escape perception. The exhibition’s strength lay in its modesty, in its refusal of spectacle in favour of an unfolding awareness that something is always at work beneath the surface.
Koetting’s current projects extend this inquiry into new and speculative terrains. In collaboration with Kyoto University, he is developing a series of drawings that use pigments derived from captured carbon dioxide, transforming an ecological process into a material for art. These works will appear in several exhibitions throughout 2026. He is also preparing the performance project Blossoms, to be presented at the Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH) in Geneva in February 2026 as part of its performing arts programme. Both projects continue his ongoing exploration of systems, energy, and care, and suggest that even the most intangible forms of transformation can find embodiment through artistic attention.