Pinksummer is pleased to announce

MICHAEL BEUTLER

Onion

opening February 14th, 2026 | 6.00 pm

On view through April 11th, 2026

Press release in interview format

Pinksummer: A paradox of philosophy is that it understands work as non-existent before Hegel if not as a formless mark of servitude, with few exceptions — such as the Sancta Regula set forth by Saint Benedict with its ora et labora, pray and work. As a matter of fact Hegel, in chapter IV of his Phenomenology of Spirit, focuses on the master-slave dialectic maintaining that work overturns its strengths, as the master, not working, depends on the workingman, and ends up losing touch with objective reality.

As the workingman, while working, impresses his form and rationality on matter, this act endows him with self-consciousness and a superior freedom. Hegel sees work as an act of human self-generation, a man is the result of his work. By satisfying the needs of civil society, work integrates the individual into a network of mutual dependence and cooperation. Through labor, one becomes a historical subject. Hegel only briefly glimpsed the danger of the mechanization of the human under the abstract and fragmented work brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Marx’s critique renders the concept of labor more material and sensuous, and above all understands the State as an instrument of the dominant classes, and capitalism as the economic distortion of a market detached from necessity and collective utility.

You have always maintained that, in relation to your work, the process is as important as the result, and that work—especially communal work—appears fundamental to any realization. We believe that you hold a conception of material labor that is profoundly spiritual with regard to self-generation, human formation and self-consciousness.

In 2026, workers are not only separated from the finished product, as they were after the industrial revolution; in this phase of financialized capitalism, workers are actually disconnected from their intelligence, which is sometimes used to train algorithms that could replace them. AI’s algorithmic management makes hiring, firing, and workload decisions based on big data. Corporate power becomes inscrutable, opaque, and difficult to challenge.

What would Hegel and Marx say today about the precarization of work, the wage compression, the de-professionalization, the real subsumption of work under digital capitalism? Will work ultimately exit humanity and fall into spurious algorithmic calculation?

 

Michael Beutler: I guess there will always be work, some of it quite detached and some as it always has been. There are works that AI cannot substitute, like the work of the plumber. And even though there is big research in how building processes could be individualized with AI and robotic tools… there is also the slow shift in understanding the limits of technology. Everything just becomes more complex and less enjoyable. There is a big longing for simpler routines, simpler and more communicative ways of working together. I believe that humans will keep work within their reach. But it is true the situation today is worrying and not everybody has the power to decide for themselves. I don´t want to imagine how many people will lose their jobs due to AI. What will they be doing instead?

 

PS: Your practice evokes DIY activism, the anti-consumerist approach, and the empowerment that promotes self-sufficiency, creating highly creative and collaborative alternatives that prepare an ontological substratum both among the teams you form and among visitors. Everyone becomes a participant, as in last year’s Bozar Monumental Flow Motion project in the Horta Hall. The manual machines you invent “on the job” for the
making of your installations are indispensable parts of the exhibition, as though highlighting the fertile relationship between work and knowledge typical of artisans, in a world dominated by AI automation.

In the past, progress and the flourishing of inventions were the work of manual workers operating in a collective environment, philosophically prepared by the Scientific Revolution: Thomas Newcomen, inventor of the steam engine in 1705, was a blacksmith; John Kay, who in 1733 invented the flying shuttle, a mechanical loom, was a cloth merchant; Abraham Darby, pioneer of the eighteenth-century iron industry, was a former miller turned founder. Workers with a strong will to experiment, and boundless energy. Social advancement often passed through the patent office.

Financialized capitalism, which soars on technological wings – as after all did the manufacturing one before it – relies on social consent. In this sense, social media and transnational fake-news factories are very much to its advantage.

We have always understood your technicalized aesthetic as a space of disobedience, and also as a survival strategy.

Is it the case that even today, no one should speak seriously about labor without having once smelled the scent of turned and milled metal?

 

MB: Well, no. Anybody should have the right to talk. I think it is good for everybody to understand that we all have different understandings of what we do. A manager, who never has touched wood, might have some good ideas about how to deal with a chair a carpenter has made. I think we are very lucky to in this world together and not alone. I feel no need to claim all the knowledge I have about the work I do. I make my work the way I do to be independent, but this doesn’t mean that I wouldn`t be interested in the opinion of someone who might not have a clue about what I do.

 

PS: You once said that, for a farmer, the most beautiful machine is the one that becomes so integrated into their agricultural system that it completely dissolves within it — completely dismantling, we might add, the notion of passive consumption. Do you believe it might be possible to take a step back and methodically imagine the idea of free expression without appearing foolish? Could this be the sense of the turning gate in the Onion exhibition you will present at Pinksummer, and of the Flow Motion at Bozar? Without nostalgic tropes, could they be loosely understood as Puertas del retorno, helping us reconnect somehow to what Hegel considered objective reality? The sense of the zoetrope within Flow Motion appeared to us as a form of training against illusions.

 

MB: I don’t know what Onion will do to people, or if it will turn and float or sink altogether… it is not finished yet. But Flow Motion was almost bizarre. It is so low tech. All that was there could have been made some hundred years ago… I really enjoy the simplicity and the way our own looking system tricks ourselves. That relation between ourselves and the structure is one special thing about this work, the really nice thing though is to experience the magic together: to observe how everyone else is also heavily wondering about reality as soon as they have entered the turning gate.

 

PS: We always have the impression, when faced with your work, that you manage to pull real, living rabbits out of metaphysical hats. Perhaps it’s just foolish imagination, but all this metaphor of rotating things, and in particular the idea of the turning gate, brought to mind the 2002 film by the Korean director Hong Sang-soo, On the Occasion of Remembering a Turning Gate: a film that speaks about love without being a sentimental film, a work in which contact is sought but emptiness is found. In the film, this line is spoken twice: “It’s hard to be human; let’s try not to become monsters.” The director draws from the Korean fable/legend about the commoner who falls in love with the princess and is reincarnated as a serpent which, following her, remains outside the temple gate — the turning gate, a gate of time — in an indeterminate and useless wait, until a storm of thunder and lightning frightens it and makes it flee backward. The turning gate appears as a metaphor for destiny, and speaking of serpents and Korea, we were also reminded of the figure of the imugi, an ancient serpent, a kind of divinity, an oracle that presides over the boundary between the sacred and the profane. The imugi dreams of becoming a dragon; it is a creature in the process of becoming, aspiring to a spiritual evolution and representing a potential not yet realized. If its attitude of desire and perseverance comes to fruition, it becomes a protector of waters and nature; if its will is frustrated, it becomes a vengeful spirit.

In this particular moment in History, humanity appears rather frustrated and vindictive: a rotating gate could resemble a symbol of life and of necessary change.

Speaking of memory, over five years and three months have passed since your last exhibition at Pinksummer, Keep Beating below 65°. It was October 2020; Covid had begun in February, people had remained shut inside their homes all spring, summer had allowed us to catch our breath again and in the press release interview for that exhibition you stated: “Covid 19 is still around and will only be dealt with when all are working together. The Internet has helped spread information and keep people busy in their lonely homes, but it also keeps spreading wrong information and a lot verschwörungstheorien. The internet provided a way to talk to my students, but meeting them in person after some months really made us very happy. So I guess, Keep beating below 65°, because we don’t want the beautiful foam to collapse. Energetic but careful beating, I would say. I so very much want to set up this tiny workshop in the gallery, that with just three or four people will make some nice foamy shapes, that will slowly grow together to shape some big structure, which will conquer the space, separate us from each other again, but hopefully also display the joy of its togetherly making.”

Precisely during the making of the exhibition, many people from the improvised team became ill with Covid, fortunately without any serious consequences — they were young. A long winter followed — not terrible in Italy like the first lockdown, but gloomy nonetheless.

Your words and that beautiful exhibition which excluded solitude had given us comfort, but since then the foamy forms of civil society appear somewhat collapsed, as if humanity were still trapped in an arcane defense mechanism activated to repel unpleasant emotionscaused by negative experiences. As if anxiety and fear had thrown us into a vicious circle. In this sense, could the turning gate represent a psychological mechanism of tightening, in consideration of the perspectives at play in the present — assuming that time remains linear, though like a coiled serpent?

 

MB: The turning gates and other works on water all create intense situations within which people usually come together. It is not so much the workshop of the last exhibition that created a social bond, but it is this strange visual experience you share with other visitors you mind find within the carousel (turning gates are of course also carousels, only you are not being moved… just mentally carried along.)

When you enter a gate, everything around you is moving. No sound is accompanying the movement and gives acoustic proof for the visual sensation. Your body feels the movement, but your feet are not walking. For the moment you might find yourself completely detached from the familiar space that the gallery promised you, as you came in and you might as well for the moment be detached from all the troubles out there. Pure physical magic sucks you in.

It was too much for quite some people in Flow Motion at Bozar. They quickly had to leave the inner circle and could take relief observing the constantly moving drum from the outside.

The observers themselves turn the gate. There only is movement when there is interaction. By the tip of your finger, you have the power to make the thing turn, for yourself and for everybody else.

The Onion depends on people as well. It invites you to play. Play has positive potentials and effects and is deeply connected to not only human creatures on this planet. Very many people simply heavily smiled sitting inside Flow Motion.

 

PS: Your new solo exhibition at Pinksummer is titled Onion, and on this as well we reflected in our own strange way. For the ancient Egyptians, the onion, with its concentric layers, with its “tunics”, represented eternal life; in biblical exegesis it was a symbol of corruption of the mind and stinging pain; in other times it was a symbol of duplicity, because of the false tears it provokes. The onion was also a tool in divinatory practices: girls undecided among suitors would carve each man’s initials into onions, and the one that sprouted first indicated the man to choose.

Naturally, Marina Abramović’s 1995 performance The Onion also came to mind. To simplify, we would say that the performance focused on the positive and liberating power of crying.

The Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, in a poem, speaks of the “onionhood” of the onion, which, “oniony” all the way to the core, “could look inside itself without feeling fear”.

Why did you Michael Beutler’s third Pinksummer solo show Onion?

 

MB: Because of an Italian childrens book Adventures of Cipollino. I tried to read it to my daughter, but I think I have to wait a little longer. This might be more of a coincidence. Another reason is the architectural use of the onion as a symbol for multiple thermic wall layers to create defined areas of specific temperature. Onion itself is a room inside the gallery, which itself is a room inside the palace. And there are more layers within Onion: a pool, a ring-shaped boat with another ring in its center and a pole as an anchor within this center. This pole prevents the boat from hitting the boundaries of the pool and at the some time allows for the buoyant movements of the structure. The center of the fountain is therefore not necessarily the center of the movement. The rotation not so much traces the line of a cirle, but rather maybe… an onion.