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bis 24.01. | #4878ARTatBerlin | Sexauer Gallery shows from Ftriday, 21. November 2025 the exhibition “We measure the Distance” by the artist Sexauer Gallery.
The nucleus of Ornella Fieres’s exhibition We measure the Distance is a photo album from the 19th century. It shows a French family who emigrated to Brazil. The photographs open a view into the past – black-and-white snapshots, preserved as memories.
The album is bound in brown leather, the cover embossed with golden initials. We leaf through it. We immerse ourselves in the past. We? – No! An artificial intelligence.
For over ten years, the artist has worked with machines, computers, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Fieres instructed an AI to look at the photographs and interpret them. For years she has been exploring how artificial intelligence perceives images of the past. In doing so, she compares human and machine perception and examines their interaction. Sometimes Fieres manipulates the AI’s perception; sometimes she adopts its perspective and expands her own. Together with the AI, Fieres dives into moments of the past: a search for traces and a work of remembrance in a virtual coworking space.
The exhibition presents four groups of works:
The Essence of a Moment / Depth Estimation features a small original print – such as a little girl with a plush toy or a woman on a mountain peak – and above it a larger, round black image with a pattern of innumerable white dots. It recalls the view through the round window of a space station into the depths of the cosmos. And indeed, it is a measurement of space – not outer space, but the space within the historical photograph.
Fieres instructed the AI to make the depth and spatiality of the old images visible. To do this, the AI calculates so-called point clouds from the two-dimensional photographs, which are then visualized in a black space. Fieres can rotate these point clouds in all directions on the computer and view the scene from various angles – almost as if she were moving around the memory itself. Each image shows one of the possible perspectives.
The Essence of a Moment / Depth Estimation offers a view into the black box of machine perception. Two perspectives meet: human memory and algorithmic analysis. The same situation, seen from different directions and with different perceptual logics – a little girl with a plush toy.
Adversarial Attack, Treefrog, 060, 2025, Fine Art Print on Baryta paper, 81 x 81 cm, unique
Inverse Depth Estimation presents two abstract black-and-white works with an almost painterly quality. Their starting point is the point clouds generated from the historical photographs. Fieres deletes specific points from the datasets, causing the spatial representation to fragment. The dataset becomes incomplete, the topography uncertain, the “memory” full of gaps. Like humans, the machine fills the voids of forgetting – when it recalculates the cloud back into an image. The machine’s gaze becomes more uncertain, more speculative, more poetic. The images unfold a delicate beauty and appear almost dreamlike.
Adversarial Attack deals with the deliberate manipulation of images through artificial intelligence. Using one AI, it is possible to disrupt the image recognition of another by altering pixels or inserting foreign motifs into the images. Such deception of one AI by another is called an “adversarial attack.”
The starting point for these works was the set of portraits from the family album. Fieres instructed an AI to insert images of animals native to Brazil into the human portraits – a hummingbird, a jaguar, and a tree frog. While such manipulations can easily mislead an AI, humans barely notice them. In Adversarial Attack, however, Fieres has intensified these interventions to such an extent that the original motif becomes almost impossible for humans to discern. Neither humans nor machines recognize the original image. What remains is the noise of manipulation. Yet beneath this noise, the portraits persist. Printed on large flags, the manipulated portraits hang from the ceiling. It almost seems as if the people of the past were floating ghostlike in the room.
We archive the Change is a video that shows a computer-generated flight through the point clouds – each cloud representing the depth measurement of a historical photograph. We are, in effect, flying through the photo album. An AI-generated voice describes, for each point cloud, what an AI saw in the historical image and notes its human-like reaction to it. It sounds restrained, yet it is unsettling, for the AI speaks in the first-person plural: We measure the distance. We listen. We study the stillness. It sounds as though the AI were including us in its “we,” as though it were itself human.
The video We archive the Change brings the exhibition together and serves as a poetic archive of artificial perception, documentation, and poetry at once: We decode the gesture. We feel the weight. We measure the Distance.
Opening: Friday, 21. November 2025, 6 – 9 pm.
Exhibition dates: Friday, 21. November 2025 until Saturday, 24. January 2026
To the gallery
Title image caption: Ornella Fieres, Inverse Depth Estimation, 108 a, 2025, Fine Art Print on Baryta paper, 200 x 150 cm, unique
Exhibition Ornella Fieres – Sexauer Gallery | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
