A SHROUD WOVEN OF SOLAR THREADS | BY ALA ROUSHAN AND CHARLES STANKIEVECH

A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads presents a ‘ritual’ space fusing archaic and contemporary atmospheres. The exhibition proposes a continuum between ancient beliefs and current energy infrastructures: from early worship of the Sun in ancient Iran to emerging planetary technologies focused on regulating solar energy.

Stemming from the artists’ fieldwork in Iran, archival research, and novel Artificial Intelligence techniques, Roushan and Stankievech offer visitors an initiation into a speculative dimension of time, where past, present, and future overlap.

Documenting the world’s oldest Mithraic cave temple, the exhibition reimagines an undocumented ritual to the solar deity Mithra from over 4000 years ago, not as a historical narrative to be reconstructed with certainty, but as a fragmented field of traces—accessed through a speculative constellation of ancient sounds, lost language, unearthed imagery, contested research, and turbulent atmosphere.

Extending the limited archaeological evidence of pre-Zoroastrian traditions into a new imaginative complex, the exhibition comprises of a central video taking us back to the worship of Mithra—a practice that coincided with the rise of the world’s first empire. A sound installation, glass reliefs of rare surviving Mithra iconography, ceremonial bells, and an obsidian altar stone with burning ritual incense attempt to resurrect not only the visual language of the past, but its sensory and sonic resonances. For the project, the artists give voice to sounds lost for thousands of years. In collaboration with the University of Toronto, they developed a custom AI model drawing on comparative linguistics to reconstruct the lost language of Mithraic rituals. Research in the vaults of the Metropolitan Museum of Art similarly brought ancient sound into the present; Bronze Age bells excavated from the region surrounding the subterranean temple were recast in contemporary alloys to ring again.

Everything in the room orbits the Sun, cast here as an object of worship, a source of power, and an instrument of control. The rituals become an attempt to establish a relationship with nature and the forces that govern it—while also revealing a certain violence in the desire to command them. A further layer proposes that sudden shifts in the Iranian plateau‘s climate thousands of years ago may have been the drive shaping these cosmologies.

Across the video‘s duration, the temple itself starts to come apart: architecture becomes vapour, atmosphere transcends historical moorings, and ground shifts toward a future still to be determined. A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads treats ritual not as a relic sealed in the past, but as a technology still under construction—one still being used to negotiate humanity‘s terms with the Sun, with Nature, with time, and with power.

The show will be on view from October 2nd through October 18th, 2026, open Thursday through Sunday across three weekends (October 2–4, 8–11, and 15–18), set in Halle am Berghain, a former heating plant for the Stalinallee area, now the Karl-Marx-Allee.

A live sound performance by the artists titled A Shadow Takes No Room in Space will be presented within the exhibition on Wednesday, October 14. The performance summons reverberations of an ancient acoustic world, calling a lost language and forgotten tones back into existence through the striking of recast bells and granular synthesis. Fire, human voice, sonified solar radiation, and the ney instrument crystallize, dissolve, and drift in and out of time.

The exhibition is financially supported by Autotelic Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, and the private donors Christopher Seagon, and others who wish to remain anonymous.

Public Opening

Friday, Oct 2 5–8 pm

Regular Opening Hours

Oct 2 to Oct 18: Thursday to Sunday: 2–7 pm and on request

Tickets

10 € / reduced 8 €

Only card payment

Performance

Wednesday, Oct 14, 8 pm