Galerie OM Second Exhibition at Intervention during Berlin Fashion Week

Galerie OM Second Exhibition at Intervention during Berlin Fashion Week entitled ‘ENCODED LANDSCAPES’.

Wall Tapestry from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century, Galerie OM’s Partie Deux opens at P100 on 2nd July, marking the start of this year’s INTERVENTION programme by Reference Studios. Across cultures, carpets have served as repositories of symbols, transforming landscapes, myths, animals and spiritual beliefs into woven surfaces. Galerie OM’s second exhibition explores the carpet and tapestry not as decoration, but as carriers of memory, ritual and encoded meaning. It brings together textiles and symbolic objects from different cultures and periods, united not through geography but through a shared visual and spiritual language.

Long before writing became widespread, stories were woven. Mountains became patterns. Animals became emblems. Sacred beliefs became geometry. Across continents and centuries, hand-woven surfaces evolved into vessels of memory, surfaces onto which entire worlds were projected and preserved. Partie Deux gathers such works spanning the seventeenth to the twenty-first century: hand-woven silk, mohair and cotton, each fabric a distinct register of touch and time, its meaning carried through global exchange and quiet persistence as a medium of sustained attention. The exhibition traces recurring forms and archetypes. Volcanic landscapes echo in abstract motifs. Insects become ornaments. Protective symbols reappear in distant traditions. Borders become thresholds. Patterns become maps. What emerges is not a survey of cultures, but a constellation of human gestures repeated across time. A tree, repeated, becomes a tree of life. A diamond, repeated, becomes a guard against misfortune. Rosettes recur as suns. Medallions recur as gardens folded into a single point. A field of repeated forms becomes, in effect, a kind of prayer made visible through pattern rather than word. These are not motifs invented once and copied. They are gestures that different hands, in different centuries, arrived at independently, as though certain forms were always waiting to be woven.

At the centre of the exhibition is the idea of the carpet as a symbolic territory. Neither image nor object, it occupies a unique position between art, architecture and ritual. It is a surface designed to be lived with, gathered upon, contemplated and inherited. To stand on a carpet, historically, was never a neutral act. It was to enter a marked space, a threshold between the domestic and the sacred, the ground and something raised slightly above it. Even now, removed from its original context and mounted as a wall tapestry, that charge remains. The work continues to behave like a territory rather than a picture, asking to be entered rather than simply viewed. This same logic of inheritance extends into a more contemporary register. The hand-weaving traditions gathered here share their lineage with the ateliers of Lake Como, where looms have long produced, by hand, the textiles that move on to become the fabrics of the world’s most established fashion houses, including Prada, Gucci and Louis Vuitton. Carpet and garment, in this sense, descend from the same gesture: a thread passed by hand through another hand, regardless of whether its final form is worn or walked upon. Partie Deux situates its commissioned works within this lineage, presented as part of Galerie OM’s intervention programme.

For Partie Deux, Galerie OM has commissioned new works by two Berlin studios working at the intersection of traditional hand-weaving and contemporary material thinking. Weberei and New Rug Studio each present a unique piece conceived for the exhibition, site-specific in sensibility, rooted in craft knowledge and resistant to easy categorisation. Installed within Galerie OM’s immersive carpet-covered environment, the works create a landscape of textures, symbols and atmospheres. Contemporary seating elements introduce a counterpoint of dark modernity, transforming the space into something between a sanctuary, a listening room and an archaeological site from an imagined future.

The sound of Partie Deux is shaped in partnership with Einklang and Inselklang, two voices in Berlin’s culture of deep listening. Einklang, the city’s specialist in HiFi and high-end audio, and Inselklang, whose handcrafted speakers are made on the island of Rügen, bring to the space a sonic dimension as considered as the works on the walls. Together, they extend the exhibition’s central proposition: that what is made slowly, by hand, with attention, carries a resonance that endures.

Galerie OM second exhibition proposes that beneath their visual differences, these objects share a common purpose: to make the invisible visible. To transform memory into material. To turn stories into symbols. To leave traces of meaning behind. In an age dominated by endless digital images, these woven surfaces remind us of a slower and more enduring form of communication, one rooted in touch, repetition, ritual and belief. The carpet becomes more than an object. It becomes a landscape of memory. The evening includes a performance.