From 26 February to 24 April 2026, Galerie Melbye-Konan presents the duo exhibition Ever in Flux in collaboration with Kunstverein Jesteburg, curated by its artistic director, Isa Katharina Hänsel.
At the heart of the exhibition is the subject in transition—identity understood as process, as a state of in-between, as continuous movement.
Ever in Flux brings together two artistic positions that, each in their own way, set the image of the subject in motion. Yannick Ackah and Anna Steinert examine how identity emerges when classical categories—figure, origin, role, self—are no longer conceived as stable forms, but as processual states. What unites both practices is a shared interest in transitions: in those moments when meanings shift, bodies transform, or images become something other than what they initially claim to be.
Art historian Hal Foster describes the contemporary subject as one that becomes legible through “its partiality, division, and fragmentation.” In Ackah’s painting, this fragmentation manifests as structured, rhythmic displacement: mask-like faces, urban patterns, and chromatic condensations form a visual vocabulary that does not fix identity but layers, fractures, and recomposes it. His works operate in an in-between space of cultural references—identity appears as an open configuration sustained by multiplicity.
Anna Steinert follows a different path, yet with comparable rigor: her paintings generate spaces into which the gaze can enter in order—following Hannah Arendt—to “exercise the imagination in wandering” . Her masks and installative gestures emerge from this logic: they are not props, but tools of identity dissolution—means of embodying imagination and transitioning performatively into other states. The masks appear as if they had emerged from the paintings themselves—protagonists of an inner topography that continues through ritual, embodiment, and the play with roles.
In the interplay between both positions, what becomes visible is what philosopher Achille Mbembe describes as the relational subject: identity does not arise from an inner core, but “through entanglements that exceed the self.” In Ackah’s work, these are the cultural currents that run through his figures; in Steinert’s, the imaginary, performative, and atmospheric forces that set bodies and roles in motion.
Cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter provides another precise resonant framework for this thinking. Wynter argues against understanding the human as a fixed anthropological constant; instead, she describes it as a “hybrid, situational being” that continually re-invents itself. It is precisely this openness that shapes Ever in Flux: the works of both artists develop images of a subject that is not represented, but formed—in transitions, ruptures, embodiments, in the movement between inside and outside.
Ever in Flux thus presents not only two distinct artistic approaches, but a shared conception of what art can accomplish today: it creates spaces in which identity is not confirmed, but questioned, expanded, and imaginatively re-experienced. Ackah’s structural hybridity and Steinert’s performative pictorial worlds complement one another in an exhibition that places becoming at its core—a subject in transition, always in motion, always in flux.
