David Horvitz is an artist based in Los Angeles whose conceptual practice— spanning a wide range of digital and physical media—often disrupts conventional notions of time and space. In his upcoming exhibition At the limits of the city at ChertLüdde, Horvitz enacts a conceptual dislocation by transposing the borders of Los Angeles into the gallery space in Berlin.

The exhibition opens with Other people (2022), a room filled entirely with portraits from a collection of over 300 digital photographs gathered using facial recognition software to identify “David Horvitz.” From this dispersed network of algorithmically found selves, the installation turns back toward Los Angeles— specifically to the public garden project initiated by Horvitz on a fallow lot off Washington Boulevard.

In the main gallery, a reconstructed structure—originally designed for the Los Angeles garden—stands in the center of the room. Recordings of poets who have performed in the garden play intermittently, carrying traces of that community into the Berlin space. This platform will also host a series of readings curated by Susan Finlay and Erin Honeycutt that further activate the exhibition and transform it into a site of collective engagement and exchange.

Scattered throughout the gallery are sculptures cast from apartment keys exchanged for keys to the garden, as well as mirrors and other small objects— materials that echo Horvitz’s engagement with everyday rituals of place-making. Cutting through the gallery space is also a line of chimes suspended from the ceiling. When activated by visitors, they play a regional German lullaby. Titled Lullaby for a landscape (2017), the work resonates with Horvitz’s ongoing fascination with cycles of night and day, sleep and dreams—moments of disappearance and transition, “when,” in the artist’s words, “one can disappear from sight, disappear from the daylight as dusk happens.” This imaginative approach, which brushes up against the poetic, runs throughout the exhibition to blur notions of night and day, public and private, Los Angeles and Berlin.

Encapsulating the whole exhibition is At the limits of the city (2025), the work from which the exhibition takes its title. The series comprises four photographs of Horvitz standing at the northernmost, southernmost, easternmost, and westernmost points of the city of Los Angeles. Installed on the wall like a compass, each image is oriented according to its true geographic direction. The arrangement frames the gallery into a conceptual map—one that invites viewers to navigate Los Angeles through Horvitz’s poetic and personal lens.

Through this gesture, Horvitz reimagines notions of place, distance, and connection, asking what it means to locate oneself within overlapping geographies. In bridging Los Angeles and Berlin, Horvitz collapses these coordinates into a shared, imaginative terrain—where abstract ideas take on physical form, and where collective experience begins to map itself anew.