“My life often feels like a comedy”: Reed Still on making art, perceiving institutional systems, and residing in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien
This year Reed Still took part in an international studio programme in the renowned Künstlerhaus Bethanien, supported by the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland. Reed Still is the first artist-in-residence of this new collaboration. He works with language, institutional systems, and documents, using them as materials of production. His exhibition 'Comedy’ in Künstlerhaus Bethanien opens on 10 September 2026. Sonja Vaskivuori conducted an interview with Reed Still.
Could you share something about your artistic background and what made you an artist in the first place?
Jumping head-first into a small inflatable pool at the age of four. That takes a certain amount of trust in one’s own imagination. Besides that, it took a lot of studying afterwards. Plenty of paperwork. A lot of failing and moving around. Talking to all kinds of people. Not settling down but often settling for less. I’ve yet to undertake a medical examination to find out why exactly.
How did you get interested in the residency in Künstlerhaus Bethanien?
As an artist, especially for one without money, one just applies to anything that comes up. That’s most of the work before the work that the audience perceives as the artist’s work actually happens. But it’s a lot of work nonetheless. A lot of precarity. So to get access to monthly income, a studio, along with other opportunities, is an absolutely wonderful opportunity as far as opportunities in this field of unfortunately scarce opportunities go. And to be sure, there have been plenty of people around here before me at Künstlerhaus Bethanien checking in on these said opportunities, in one form or another. Marina Abramović. Susan Sontag. Samuel Beckett. The list goes on and on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Actually, my mother saw the open call and forced me to apply. So I did. Mothers know best.
Your exhibition ‘Comedy’ contains works you have been working on during your stay in Künstlerhaus Bethanien. How has the experience been in the residence?
There’s been space and time to think. 75m2 and 6 months to be exact. Sometimes I wander around in the empty studio in the dark trying to avoid bumping into the walls that never seem to come. Something could be said about having to share bathrooms with other artists. But some things are better left unsaid. The exhibition was supposed to be something else first and then something else happened after. The institution always wants one thing, promises the other, and delivers yet another thing. There have been plenty of questions about spaces. Of course, as a result, something else happened, as that is the nature of things.
Living in Berlin and being part of the art scene here must be exciting for an artist, tell us something about that.
Living in Berlin is one thing, and living next to Kottbusser Tor is another. One could call it lively. I don’t find the art scene particularly exciting anywhere, nor do I find art in general particularly exciting anywhere. Especially compared to the life beyond the said scene, which is where all the interesting things happen. But one does not need excitement in life so much as intellectual challenge. I do enjoy many artists here though and I’m happy to call many of them friends and I hope many of them will give me a call once I’m gone, which will be too soon for my liking.
What does the name ‘Comedy’ reveal about the exhibition?
If we were to believe Dante, it would just mean that it ends in a happy way. Somehow upwards. If we were to believe Beckett, it could be the opposite, and one just has to endure it all anyways. Could go either way really. I don’t know whom to trust here. But it’s dead serious business. And a lot of it is about the business of death. My life often feels like a comedy. As a matter of fact, I’ve moved 25 times in the last 6 years. So I think about Diogenes a lot. The exhibition will be two framed leases, one for a sublet and one for a grave, and then there’s a barrel.
Reed Still – The Barrel. ©Reed Still
Institutional systems play a key role in your work. How do you define an institution?
An institution is practically anything that tells you what you can or cannot do, for how long, and what happens after. A funder. A residency. A museum. A landlord. A graveyard. A court. A nation. A father. An empire. An institution has to believe itself. And an institution relies on other people believing it is something too. A lot of what I do is for me to figure out what is even possible. And certainly the field of possibilities is shrinking.
What led you to choose documents and language into the focus of your work?
Most of my life was already revolving around applications, contracts, leases, visas, safety regulations, guidelines, etc. Bureaucracy is the site where legal language is being enforced upon material reality. One can’t escape it. But it’s easy to fall outside it. Or perhaps sideways in it. And the more you actually follow the said regulations to the letter, the worse things get. Certainly more absurd. A document is a wall, is a door, is a lock, is a key, is another wall.
Where do your ideas come from?
I don’t think they come to me but rather collide. Often it’s something that has happened or that I cannot quite reach. So I keep reaching. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about work and housing. I often find myself in a situation where my works have a place to stay, but not me.
What does your work process look like?
I wake up without an alarm clock, after at least half an hour, try to get out of bed, which is often prompted by the urge to make coffee and the need to have a light breakfast so I don’t get the jitters, followed by the toilet, a shower, the-brushing-of-the-teeth, a walk, a lunch, a lot of sitting around the studio, ordering stuff online, booking appointments, answering emails, a dinner, some wine, and, in between, I am constantly thinking about things, and then, when the opportunity presents itself, in the form of an exhibition, a residency, or funding, all of which are scarce anyways, as I mentioned before, I do something about the things I’ve been thinking about. So now I’ve been trying to rent a grave for 20 years.
Reed Still – The Grave. ©Reed Still