lina lapelytė fills hamburger bahnhof with 400,000 cubes, inviting visitors to build and sing

lina lapelytė’s collective construction in hamburger bahnhof

At Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Lithuanian artist and composer Lina Lapelytė fills the museum’s vast Historic Hall with 400,000 wooden cubes for We Make Years Out of Hours, the second edition of the Chanel Commission. Opening during Gallery Weekend Berlin and on view until January 10th, 2027, the large-scale participatory installation turns the museum into a shifting terrain of collective building, singing, and coexistence.

Through choreography, sound, and audience participation, Lapelytė dissolves distinctions between sculpture and performance, monument and gathering, asking visitors to physically shape the exhibition as they move through it.

The installation unfolds across the museum floor as a continuously changing landscape composed of spruce and pine cubes measuring 10 x 10 x 10 centimeters each. Twelve performers activate the work alongside visitors, stacking, carrying, dismantling, and rebuilding temporary architectural forms that gradually evolve into hills, towers, and communal structures. Every gesture alters the environment, creating an unstable spatial composition where construction and disappearance exist simultaneously. In this constantly transforming setting, Lapelytė reflects on the fragility of collective systems and the negotiations embedded within public space, asking who builds, who removes, and whose labor sustains these transformations.

Lina Lapelytė. We Make Years Out of Hours, exhibition view Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, 2026 © Lina Lapelytė. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026. photo: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / art/beats, Florian Mag

songs become architecture

Throughout the day, voices move through the Historic Hall in cycles of collective singing. The libretto draws from poems and writings by fifteen international authors spanning the early twentieth century to today, including Khalil Gibran, Etel Adnan, Forugh Farrokhzad, Mahmoud Darwish, Ocean Vuong, Ilya Kaminsky, and Arundhathi Subramaniam. Short poetic fragments addressing love, grief, hope, formation, and community circulate through the space as both soundtrack and structural force, binding bodies and architecture together through rhythm and repetition.

The exhibition’s title, We Make Years Out of Hours, points to the accumulation of individual gestures into collective memory. Small actions become enduring structures, while fleeting encounters form temporary communities inside the museum. Lapelytė extends this idea beyond the exhibition itself. Following the conclusion of the show, the 400,000 cubes will be repurposed as part of a public artwork in Eisenhüttenstadt in 2027 through her ongoing project for Die Neuen Auftraggeber.

visitors and performers continuously reshape the installation

collective vulnerability at the center of the artist’s practice

Working between Vilnius and London, Lapelytė is known for performances that foreground vulnerability, listening, and collective participation through singing. Her internationally recognized opera Sun & Sea received the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, establishing the artist as a leading voice in contemporary performance-based practice. With We Make Years Out of Hours, she continues her exploration of communal experience while expanding it to an architectural scale.

Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, the exhibition also forms part of Hamburger Bahnhof’s 30th anniversary program, which examines the future of the contemporary museum through exhibitions, performances, and public programming across 2026. Positioned within the institution’s monumental industrial hall, Lapelytė’s installation reframes the museum not as a static container for objects, but as an evolving social space shaped collectively over time.

a landscape of 400,000 wooden cubes

temporary architectural forms emerge across the Historic Hall through stacking, carrying, and rebuilding

the installation evolves through collective gestures that continuously alter the spatial composition

twelve performers activate the participatory work

performers construct and dismantle temporary structures from thousands of spruce and pine cubes | image by Laura Fiorio

performers choreograph acts of construction and dismantling | image by Laura Fiorio

visitors become active participants in Lina Lapelytė’s evolving architectural landscape | image by Laura Fiorio

We Make Years Out of Hours explores collective labor, coexistence, and vulnerability | image by Laura Fiorio

visitors and performers reshape the monumental wooden landscape | image by Laura Fiorio

Lina Lapelytė inside We Make Years Out of Hours, the 2026 CHANEL Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof | image by Laura Fiorio

project info:

name: We Make Years Out of Hours

artist: Lina Lapelytė | @linalapelyte

venue: Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart | @hamburger_bahnhof

dates: May 1st, 2026 – January 10th, 2027

curators: Sam Bardaouil + Till Fellrath

commission: Chanel Commission 2026

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