“The boat is the time physique. The water is the connecting line.”
The place Motion Turns into Materials
For Nadja Haas, the borders between visible artwork and dance are permeable. The Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, performer and choreographer works throughout efficiency, set up, drawing, writing, textiles, sound and pictures, treating every medium as half of a bigger inquiry into how our bodies encounter area and materials. Her follow is rooted in each positive artwork and dance, with research in London that included an MA on the Slade Faculty of Superb Artwork alongside coaching in dance and choreography. That twin basis continues to form a follow involved with embodiment, reminiscence, ritual, ecology and the bodily and emotional affect of place. Fairly than separating motion from visible manufacturing, Haas approaches them as languages succesful of turning into each other. Motion can operate as drawing, a gesture can tackle sculptural qualities, and an area will be understood choreographically. This mind-set permits picture, sound, materials and bodily presence to satisfy with out one self-discipline changing into subordinate to a different. Collaboration is particularly necessary inside that construction, giving completely different inventive languages room to have an effect on the path and type of a piece. Her early relationship with drawing started by means of artist Marc van den Broek, her first artwork trainer, who launched her to up to date artwork and artwork historical past and taught her to look at intently. Haas remembers his encouragement to develop a person means of seeing. That lesson stays lively in her work, the place cautious consideration typically precedes making. Drawing grew to become an early technique for decoding the world, whereas openness to supplies and disciplines grew right into a defining precept of her later follow.
Nadja Haas: Listening Earlier than Type
Haas describes her work as interdisciplinary, process-based and relational. Superb artwork developed her sensitivity to picture, materials and spatial thought, whereas choreography introduced time, presence and the physique into the equation. As a substitute of selecting between these fields, she step by step understood that her work required their intersection. Sound, dance, sculpture, picture and set up can due to this fact function collectively, with which means rising by means of their contact quite than from a predetermined hierarchy. This angle is concentrated in Listening Motion, a technique Haas has developed by means of years of motion and choreographic follow. Constructed round consideration, listening, somatic consciousness and shared presence, it informs greater than efficiency. Haas carries the identical responsiveness into visible artwork, remaining attentive to what a cloth, web site or scenario affords earlier than deciding what it ought to grow to be. The method resists imposing a hard and fast outcome on the outset and as a substitute makes receptivity a part of inventive authorship. Her day by day follow displays that flexibility. A working day may start with drawing or writing and shift into motion, sound or direct engagement with supplies. She collects fragments, data sounds, images particulars and notices gestures, surfaces and locations, typically holding onto these observations for lengthy intervals earlier than they discover an applicable kind. Rivers, wind, water, textiles and altering mild recur as sources of knowledge, whereas experiences throughout completely different cultural and geographical environments have sharpened her consideration to motion, belonging and displacement.
Drawing by Nadja Haas.
Water as Presence, Not Topic
The Blue, created with Abigail Sanders and Warya Ribanova and introduced at Dock 11 in Berlin in 2025, introduced a number of of Haas’s recurring considerations into shut contact. Developed by means of motion, sound, picture and spatial composition, the work started with water, fluidity and the connection between the human physique and ecological methods. Its significance lies in a shift that occurred in the course of the course of: water ceased to operate merely as a theme and have become an lively presence inside the work. That change generated questions Haas continues to hold ahead. How may a panorama be listened to? What can water bear in mind? How can a physique reply to one thing outlined by fixed motion and transformation? Such questions join ecological consciousness to embodied expertise with out decreasing both to illustration. Additionally they present how her curiosity in reminiscence extends past the person physique towards supplies, environments and the traces that locations might maintain. Collaboration continues to widen this inquiry. With composer, sound artist and researcher Dr Felicity Wilcox, Haas is growing *Late Summertime Girl*, an interdisciplinary efficiency combining motion, music, sound and textual content. Their shared focus is the connection between the feminine physique, panorama, ecology and transformation, with the coastal landscapes and waters of Kerry, Eire serving as an necessary level of departure. From a shared basis of poetry and textual content, Wilcox creates the music and sound whereas Haas develops motion and choreography, permitting the 2 practices to form each other in actual time. The work is scheduled for DOCK 11 in Berlin on 4 December 2026.
Nadja Haas: A Studio That Travels
Haas’s collaborative follow with Karim Teufel has developed into NKV, Nadja & Karim, a creative duo working between motion, sound, visible artwork, materials and panorama. Their subsequent main enterprise, The Rivering: An Creative Journey, is deliberate for 2027. Starting on the Rhine in Oestrich-Winkel, the route will observe European waterways towards Sète on the Mediterranean earlier than finally returning to Berlin. At its middle is Waterman, a historic Amsterdam tugboat inbuilt 1912 and rebuilt with an extra cabin in 1952. For Haas, the uncertainty of what the journey will produce is prime. The river, boat, landscapes, encounters and passing time will enter the method quite than merely present its setting. Waterman is known not solely as transportation however as a historic physique carrying reminiscence by means of its sounds, surfaces and traces. Water, in the meantime, turns into a connective component throughout areas and histories. Haas captures the challenge’s logic succinctly: the boat is the time physique, and the water is the connecting line. The Rivering will function concurrently as a journey by means of Europe, a shifting studio, an encounter with panorama and an experiment in permitting an art work to journey. This outward motion additionally displays Haas’s broader dedication to trade. In 2026 she introduced a efficiency in Venice in the course of the second version of PERFORMATICA, curated by Hector Canonge, a global context that linked her efficiency follow with motion, migration, place and inventive trade. She additionally participated in Supersymmetry, the inaugural presentation of the Resilient Natures worldwide artwork residency in Berlin, the place her site-specific follow was framed by means of connections amongst physique, place, reminiscence and the residing setting. Wanting forward, she hopes to construct additional worldwide relationships, significantly in Japan, whereas NKV seeks funding companions, cultural establishments and collaborators to accompany The Rivering in 2027.
