Per the artist, night has begun to fall on all of us, which nevertheless makes it a moment to reach out and connect
In the warren of small rooms that constitutes CCA Berlin’s ground floor, Éric Baudelaire’s When Night Falls begins with 12 horizontal, 15-cm-squared, relieflike sculptures in tactile carved cherrywood set onto metal tables. ‘You may touch the sculptures,’ says the exhibition booklet; since the works’ titles are in Braille, perhaps you touch with eyes closed, running your fingers over landscapelike topographies that occasionally erupt into globular architectural forms. These works were, it turns out, based on sculptures – assembled from plasticine, toys, jewellery, etc – made by students in Paris’s National Institute for Blind Youth, and with whom the French artist has now worked on multiple projects. (Each wooden sculpture is titled Clair de Lune [Moonlight, 2026]) and subtitled for its original maker.) Operating and creating productively in some kind of darkness – both here and in the videowork downstairs that constitutes the rest of the show – turns out to be the show’s guiding metaphor.
Baudelaire was inspired, apparently, by reading something said by Roland Barthes in his 1976–77 lecture series ‘How to Live Together’: ‘To be strangers to one another is inevitable, even necessary and desirable – except when night falls.’ Per the artist, uncontroversially, night has begun to fall on all of us – the world, that is, is visibly going to shit, literally becoming benighted – which nevertheless makes it a moment to reach out and connect; additionally, the act of subjective interpretation, it will transpire, can be surprisingly redemptive. The five-channel, 88-minute video installation Quand le soir tombe (When Night Falls, 2026), shot in six different French locations, makes that clear from multiple angles. In one segment, for example, we see students (‘mostly from working-class and immigrant backgrounds’, says the booklet) in a school in the Paris suburb of La Défense, learning how to trade stocks using computer simulations; trading might be the epitome of cold capitalism, but here the act becomes a connector between disadvantaged strangers and maybe even, for some, a way out of being disadvantaged.
The next sequence splices a variety of footage shot at the French National Metrology and Testing Laboratory. We see operants seemingly testing – by blowing puffs of powder at them – the efficacy of protective masks and visors wrapped around polystyrene heads; stress-testing condoms; rigorously checking how well attached are the potential choking hazards of plastic eyes and noses on children’s toys. If nobody talks to each other here, the businesslike (and lawsuit-avoiding) tests are surprisingly reframed, under Baudelaire’s broadly humanist aegis, as acts of care and mutuality towards strangers. In a subsequent segment at the UNESCO General Assembly, where Baudelaire’s cinematographer Claire Mathon filmed people from 193 nations convening to ‘discuss social cohesion in a divided world’, we see the Babel of delegates being brought together by a performance from an all-women string quartet, and fraternising across borders afterwards; we see translators bringing disparate people together. In an Ivry-sur-Seine storage facility where art and statuary for municipal museums overspills, the camera observes both attentive restorers plying their skills and plastic-wrapped statuary; Baudelaire – here seemingly summoning echoes of the 1953 French portmanteau essay-film by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet, Statues Also Die – focuses on pained, embracing figures.
On occasion, these evocations of collectivity make their point long before they stop: not least the one covering a national election vote – setting Emmanuel Macron against the far-right Marine Le Pen – in a small Normandy town, wherein the camerawork alternates between acts of voting, diligent vote-counting aimed at preserving democracy and a wintry 1886 painting in the voting office by Francis Tattegrain depicting a besieged town whose occupants resort to cannibalism. We probably didn’t need to see all that vote-counting to get a sense of decency at risk of tipping into barbarism. But it’s significant that Baudelaire is finding, as in all these scenarios, an alternative narrative, a different and cautiously hopeful way of seeing things. If night, in his and Barthes’s titular formulation, is falling, it’s not fully dark yet; we might still, in whatever situation, locate the light and the human connections that remain.
Éric Baudelaire: When Night Falls was at CCA Berlin, 12 June – 29 August
From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
