No King, No God, No Thanks
Solo exhibition, Off Space Berlin, 2026
Installation view
Installation view
Installation view
The Gate to the Talmud
Stickers on PVC, 136 × 183 cm, 2026
Tempwave
Video 4:46, 2026
JTM-26-0001: Fragment from the Second Temple
Plaster, MDF, acrylic, 53 × 43 × 58 cm, 2026
JTM-26-0001: Fragment from the Second Temple
Plaster, MDF, acrylic, 53 × 43 × 58 cm, 2026
MAL-26-4896
Painted plaster, 97 × 97 cm, 2026
Skopje 2014
Concrete and ready-made, 22 × 14.5 × 18 cm, 2026
Synagogues
Ready-made, printed picture, 186 × 43 cm, 2026
The Lord is the King
Ready-made, printed picture, 193 × 30 cm, 2026
Kissing the Torah scroll
Ready-made picture, 35 × 23 cm, 2025
Religious hierarchy
Silk screen print, 70 × 50 cm, 2025
A reminder of the Temple's destruction
Velvet fabric, 105 × 103 cm, 2026
WASH-26-0042
Silicone on paper, 35 × 35 cm, 2026
Early in the second Trump presidency, peculiar decorations appeared on the walls of the Oval Office. Heavily gilded yet oddly misproportioned, they seemed almost haphazardly applied. Rumors soon circulated that the ornaments were plastic pieces sourced from Home Depot.
Shlomo Pozner’s exhibition takes this anecdote as an unlikely point of departure. Drawing on both worldly and religious symbolism—much of it rooted in the culture of his Haredi upbringing in Jerusalem and the Russian Yeshiva that shaped his early intellectual formation—Pozner develops a pointed meditation on the visual languages through which authority attempts to manufacture legitimacy.
His target is not only religious orthodoxy but also the persistent rhetoric of historical continuity mobilized by many contemporary reactionary movements. These narratives invoke an imagined past of coherence and grandeur in order to stabilize present political identities. Yet such pasts are largely fictive: artificial narratives conjured to legitimize exclusionary social positions. Both contemporary Haredi culture and twenty-first-century conservatism are thus exposed as relatively recent formations that nonetheless insist on projecting the aura of ancient lineage.
Within this framework, ornament becomes a crucial ideological device. Emblems, stylistic references, and architectural motifs perform the work of staging continuity where little actually exists. The gilded decorations that appear throughout the exhibition—often awkward, oversized, or deliberately crude—echo precisely this theatrical production of authority.
Yet Pozner’s work resists a purely polemical reading. In pieces such as “The gate to the Talmud”, the artist turns toward a more subtle investigation of continuity itself. Here, lineage is not theatrically proclaimed but structurally embedded. The motif of the Vilna Gate—historically used as a frontispiece for the Talmud- functions as a conceptual threshold. The classical archway becomes a figure for entry into knowledge, a passage toward interpretation and understanding.
Against this layered metaphor, the exhibition’s gaudy ornaments appear all the more hollow. Their ostentation reveals itself as pure surface—signifiers of authority that can never quite become the thing they claim to represent. They remain images of power rather than its substance.
A pivotal work in the exhibition is “Religious Hierarchy”. Examining the spatial organization of a Talmud page, Pozner uncovers a surprisingly modernist compositional logic. The typographic architecture of the page—its margins, blocks of text, and carefully structured hierarchy—produces a field of clarity and balance that reads almost like an abstract diagram. What emerges is a form of beauty that belongs not to ornament but to structure.
This epistemological dimension is central to Pozner’s work. Beneath the tawdry theatricality of the exhibition’s ornamental language lies a persistent suspicion—perhaps even a hope—that genuine coherence might still be found within tradition once the pretentious trappings and delusions of grandiosity are stripped away.
Seen from this perspective, the exhibition’s critique becomes more ambivalent. What initially reads as a dismantling of both religious and secular claims to legitimacy ultimately contains a quieter tension: alongside the exposure of ideological posturing runs a lingering desire for a world structured by clarity, meaning, and truth.
Text: Roger Bundschuh, March 2026