In an exhibition spanning Galerie Barbara Thumm's two Berlin spaces, Austrian artist Elke Krystufek furthers her personal, feminist examination of the absurdity of social conventions. The exhibition's centerpiece is Krystufek's 45-minute A FILM CALLED WOOD, which defies filmic conventions by leaping from one obscure monologue to the next, evading narrative coherency. Among Krystufek's seven aggressively expressionist portraits, WOOD's protagonists reappear, as in Virginia, surrounded by jarring quotations from the script, while elsewhere, the artist portrays herself as the Hindu goddess Lakshmi. Krystufek's two curiously domestic sculptures — variations on a table and a pair of nightstands — also directly reference her unruly film. With affinities to the Viennese Actionists, Krystufek plays with different artistic genres to shift the meanings of contemporary iconography.

-Sarah Stephenson