Éric Baudelaire
When Night Falls

Opening: 11 June 2026, 6–9 PM

Éric Baudelaire, When Night Falls, 2026. Exhibition poster. Designed by Pierre-François Letué.

CCA Berlin is pleased to present When Night Falls, a solo exhibition by French artist Éric Baudelaire. The show premieres an eponymous five-channel video installation in the basement of the exhibition space, accompanied by sculptural interventions on the ground floor.

The central video work unfolds across five screens, tracing seven seemingly unrelated locations—from Europe's largest flower farm to the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. Baudelaire weaves these disparate sites into a meditation on the splendor and cruelty of coexistence: a testament to the beauty and absurdity of how we live, work, and organize our collective lives at a moment when the foundations of society feel increasingly fractured.

The exhibition takes its title from Roland Barthes' final lecture series, How to Live Together (1977), in which he observes: "To be strangers to one another is inevitable, even necessary and desirable—except when night falls." Held against that threshold, the work opens a space to reflect upon the conditions we create for living together, ones that preserve difference and dignity, as darkness settles in all around us.

Supported by Stiftung Kunstfonds and Trampoline Association.

Curators: Fabian Schöneich with Nan Xi
Production: Franz Hempel
Guest curator for discourse: Jakob Grüner

Éric Baudelaire (1973) is an artist and filmmaker based in Paris, France. After training as a political scientist, Baudelaire established himself as a visual artist with a research-based practice incorporating photography, printmaking and video. Since 2010, filmmaking has become central to his work. His feature films A Flower in the MouthUn film dramatiqueAlso Known as JihadiLetters to MaxThe Ugly one and The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images have circulated widely in film festivals (including Locarno, Toronto, New York, FID Marseille, and Rotterdam). When shown within exhibitions, Baudelaire’s films are part of broad installations that include works on paper, performance, publications and public programs, in projects such as Après at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and The Secession Sessions, which began at Bétonsalon in Paris and traveled to Bergen Kunsthall, the Berkeley Art Museum and Sharjah Biennial 12. Baudelaire has had monographic exhibitions at the Witte de With [formerly known as], Rotterdam, Tabakalera, San Sebastian, the Fridericianum, Kassel, the Beirut Art Center, Gasworks, London, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and has participated in the 2017 Whitney Biennale, the 2014 Yokohama Triennale, Mediacity Seoul 2014, and the 2012 Taipei Biennial. In 2019 Baudelaire was the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and the Prix Marcel Duchamp.