Lapelytė transforms the museum’s historic hall into an ever-changing landscape where 400,000 wooden cubes are continuously rearranged by performers and visitors, forming temporary architectural structures. The installation is accompanied by a vocal soundscape based on texts by fifteen international poets. Combining sculpture, performance and audience participation, the work explores themes of time, care and collective creation.
Lina Lapelytė is among the Baltic region’s most internationally recognised contemporary artists. Her practice centres on the human voice and sound as tools for exploring listening, collective singing and human relationships. In 2019, together with Vaiva Grainytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, she received the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the Venice Biennale for the opera-performance Sun & Sea.
Hamburger Bahnhof’s annual CHANEL Commission invites artists to create ambitious new site-specific works for the museum’s historic 2,500-square-metre hall. Lapelytė’s installation is the programme’s second commission and forms part of the museum’s 30th anniversary celebrations.
© Lina Lapelytė. We Make Years Out of Hours, exhibition view Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, 2026. Photo: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Laura Fiorio
A critic’s perspective: when play becomes an artistic experience
In his review for Echo Gone Wrong, art critic Joonas Pulkkinen argues that We Make Years Out of Hours functions less as a monumental installation than as a constantly evolving living organism shaped collectively by performers, visitors, sound and space. In his view, play is not simply an activity within the work but a method through which Lapelytė invites audiences to slow down, pay attention and reconnect with both their surroundings and one another.
Pulkkinen also highlights a broader paradox of contemporary exhibition-making. While the installation is visually striking and undeniably well suited to social media, its value does not lie in creating shareable images. Instead, he suggests that the work’s simplicity and people’s willingness to participate offer hope that, even in the age of social media, art can still foster meaningful shared experiences rather than merely generating content.
This reading also echoes Lapelytė’s earlier work. Her internationally acclaimed Sun & Sea, which won the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, likewise used music and the human voice as its primary artistic material. While Sun & Seaexamined climate change and contemporary society through the seemingly ordinary setting of a beach, We Make Years Out of Hours continues this artistic trajectory by using sound, movement and play to shape relationships between visitors.
In Lapelytė’s practice, sound is never simply accompaniment. The human voice structures the work, creates rhythm and emotional resonance, transforms space and turns strangers into a temporary community. This ability to weave together sound, performance and social interaction has become one of the defining characteristics of her artistic practice.
© Lina Lapelytė, Portrait , Berlin, 2026. Photo: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Laura Fiorio
Why it matters
Museum commissions represent one of the highest forms of international recognition in contemporary art. Unlike conventional exhibitions, they are typically supported by substantially larger production budgets, longer development periods and close collaboration with curators, researchers and museum teams, enabling artists to realise projects of a scale and complexity that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. These commissions frequently receive extensive international visibility, generate new scholarship and become part of museum collections and future art historical discourse.
Lapelytė’s new commission at Hamburger Bahnhof demonstrates that Baltic artists are increasingly being invited to create major new works for Europe’s leading cultural institutions. Beyond advancing the artist’s own international career, projects of this calibre also strengthen the global visibility and reputation of contemporary art from the Baltic region.
© Lina Lapelytė. We Make Years Out of Hours, exhibition view Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, 2026. Photo: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / art/beats, Florian Mag
Sources
- Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. CHANEL Commission: Lina Lapelytė – We Make Years Out of Hours. Exhibition information and press materials.
- Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. Press Release: CHANEL Commission 2026 – Lina Lapelytė.
- Echo Gone Wrong. Joonas Pulkkinen: “The Poetry, Joy, and Sound of the Cubes: Lina Lapelytė’s CHANEL Commission – We Make Years Out of Hours at Hamburger Bahnhof.”
