“We no longer become romanticists,” she says, “just accomplices telling each other stories that end in disaster.”

There has been a theme in recent years, of artists becoming therapists, translating an intuitive impulse into the practical, reparative, “useful”. Gernot Weiland pulls from the language and tenets of therapy, less for an individual cure than collective psychic unwinding.

His characters move through rooms of weighty metaphor: a housekeeping cart, pins in yellowing drywall, rusted chairs on a bleak balcony all carry the residue of war, oppression, and cruelty. As narrator, he ambles deeper into the muck of history asking impossible questions with total sincerity. 

A woman lies under the bed writing poems in the dust, a scene both absurd and devastating. Fairy tales are no longer innocent stories for children. Truly, Hansel and Gretel is a story about starvation and capitalism in thewistful countryside. Yet the wolf is too ridiculous to fear in the face of fascism. Maybe the answer lies with the trickster fox, at least he can take a joke. 

times presents Family Constellation with a Fox (2025).The film will be accompanied by a series of sculptures displayed in the gallery’s screening room.

Gernot Wieland (1968, Horn, Austria) is an artist based in Berlin whose films, drawings, lecture-performances and installations comment on human notions of belonging within inherited social, political and psychological processes.