Angharad Williams

Berlin Straße, Angharad Williams’ second exhibition at Schiefe Zähne, explores the urban and social fabric in her chosen home of Berlin. Recognizing the street as a place of communal organization outside of established structures, Williams tunes into the vibrant pulse that unfolds in daily life throughout the city. Berlin, a city still marked by its Cold War division, seems for many to hold promise and prospect. As its vast unclaimed spaces are becoming increasingly enclosed, what was long neglected is now fiercely fought over between global money and local resistance. Williams traces the forms of subaltern social organization that emerge on the ground in the city, like the collection of Pfandflaschen (deposited, reusable bottles) as a form of para-economical income.

Taking advantage of the domestic setting of the gallery which is located on the second floor of a typical Berliner Altbau,Williams divides the space into interior and exterior spheres. This spatial intervention mirrors Berlin’s inherent dialectic, oscillating between public and intimate, collectivity and isolation, or even the paradox that unfolds in the uncharted openness of the city; what for some means utopian, creative freedom is for others a harsh reality of the daily grind. In new sculptural works, painting and photography, Williams captures the poignancy of dreams and fantasy amidst the detritus of everyday life, making candid propositions of alternative forms of exchange, leveraged from imagination, poetics and speculative fabulation, beyond established governing institutions.

Angharad Williams’ (Ynys Môn, Wales) work prompts introspection and critical reflection on the dynamics that govern our lives and environments. Her multifaceted art practice - painting, drawing, writing, sculpture, photography, installation, film and performance - attends to the forms that, hidden in plain sight, serve as projective screens or filters for our most subconscious desires and fears. These often equivocal expressions are rooted in writing, shaped by issues of authority, security and design, and are central to the subjection of individuals, their communities and the landscapes they inhabit. Williams’ artworks and exhibitions capture this process as an accumulation of desire, at once avenues of escape from barracks and confinement of all kinds, and candid observations of humankind’s unstable nature, its intrinsic wildness and its blanket violence and sensuality.

Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Simian, Copenhagen (2025), Berlin Straße, Schiefe Zähne, Berlin, Germany (2024), Life and Times, Kantine, Brussels, Belgium (2023); Eraser, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2022); Picture the Others, Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales (2022); High Horse, Kevin Space, Vienna, Austria (2021); Without the scales, Schiefe Zähne, Berlin (2020). Group exhibitions include museo Madre, Naples (2024); We Smell Gas, Reena Spaulings, New York, US (2023); What Kind of Us Does Painting Need?, Made In Gallery, Shanghai, China, (2023); The Wig, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2022); Tourism, Stadtgalerie Bern, Bern, Switzerland (2021); Second, Fri Art, Fribourg, Switzerland (2021); Not working, Kunstverein Munich, Munich, Germany (2020).

Angharad Williams’ book Eraser was published by After8 Books, Paris, France in 2023. In summer 2024 Williams will release a limited 12” vinyl with Concentric Group, London & the Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau.