When Night Falls

CCA Berlin is pleased to present When Night Falls, a solo exhibition by French artist Éric Baudelaire. The show premieres an eponymous five-channel video installation in the basement of the exhibition space, accompanied by sculptural interventions on the ground floor. The central video work unfolds across five screens, tracing seven seemingly unrelated locations—from Europe's largest flower farm to the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. Baudelaire weaves these disparate sites into a meditation on the splendor and cruelty of coexistence: a testament to the beauty and absurdity of how we live, work, and organize our collective lives at a moment when the foundations of society feel increasingly fractured. The exhibition takes its title from Roland Barthes' final lecture series, How to Live Together (1977), in which he observes: "To be strangers to one another is inevitable, even necessary and desirable—except when night falls." Held against that threshold, the work opens a space to reflect upon the conditions we create for living together, ones that preserve difference and dignity, as darkness settles in all around us.