Duo Exhibition: Holzig?! Elma Riza & Aurélie Pertusot @Retramp

2.10.2026 – 11.10.2026

Opening: Friday, October 2, 2026, 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Performance “à sec“ by Aurélie Pertusot, 6:30 p.m.
Open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 3:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

The duo exhibition Holzig?! presents thematically curated works by visual artists Elma Riza and Aurélie Pertusot for the Retramp Gallery in Berlin. Both artists, who work across disciplines – Elma Riza in Berlin and Aurélie Pertusot in Nancy and Berlin – have collaborated on various projects in recent years and consistently explore the relationship between body and space. In their works ‘space’ can refer to urban space, architecture or landscape. Through their artistic practice, perceptions of our inner and outer environments are repeatedly and playfully questioned, and relationships renegotiated.
Over the past few months, both artists have been exploring landscape, nature, flora and, above all, trees. This has resulted in art works spanning various disciplines: drawings, photographs, video works, and ideas for installations and performances. The exhibition Holzig?! presents a selection of those works, each with different connections to landscape, to the forest and to trees. The exhibition explores matter, human codes within nature, the experience of the tree as a material, sensory perception, alternative perspectives on landscapes and, consequently, new relationships between humans and nature. The artists thus indirectly raise questions such as what new relationships we humans can forge with flora, including within an urban context. ‘Holzig!?’ invites insights and new connections, and in doing so also subtly explores the experience of resonance between humans and nature, and with trees – here within the context of art and the gallery (with a reference to the street in Berlin-Neukölln).
Alongside works on paper, relief works and photographs, Elma Riza’s video work A travers les chemins will be screened and sound artist Aurélie Pertusot will perform her work à sec – a ‘leaves concert’ based on an ensemble of dried leaves – live at the opening and closing events at the Retramp Gallery.

Curated by Katia Hermann

About the artists

Elma Riza (born in 1986 in Lilas, France) is a French-Tunisian interdisciplinary artist. She graduated from the Weißensee Academy of Art in 2012 and has lived and worked in Berlin ever since. She has already held five solo exhibitions: R17*_ Experimental Zone Berlin (2025), STRouX Berlin (2023), Galerie weisser elefant (2020), La Boîte _ Un lieu d’Art Contemporain Tunis (2018), Kunstverein Neukölln (2017). 
She regularly collaborates with other artists (Aurélie Pertusot, Laure Catugier, Petra Gell, Les actionnaires, Sudden Starlings Collectiv…) and has taken part in numerous group exhibitions: Carbone, France / Bacio Gallery, Switzerland / GISELA – Freierkunstraum Lichtenberg / TGM Gallery Tunis / Kustraum Fuge Berlin / Kunstverein Ebersberg / Galerie Philomena+ Vienna / Pavillon am Milchhof Berlin / Max Liebermann Haus Berlin / Kunsthaus Essen.
Her work takes shape across various media, including video, performance, photography, installation, screen printing and drawing. Her research centres on the concept of landscape from ecological, feminist, anthropological and poetic perspectives. She questions our relationship with the urban, everyday or so-called ‘natural/wild’ landscape. To this end, she explores the boundaries that define our spaces, as well as the relationships between elements, between interior and exterior spaces, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between our diverse realities and our individual and collective imaginaries, between the visible and the invisible…

https://elmariza.com
https://www.instagram.com/elma.riza_artist/

Born in Nancy (fr) in 1983, Aurélie Pertusot is a visual artist, performer and musician and focusing on time & site-specific perceptions. A graduate of the Écoles Supérieures d’Art de Nancy, Sint Lukas Art School in Brussels (2007) and the Exercising Modernity Academy program in Berlin (2022), she lives and works between Nancy (fr) and Berlin. Co- founder of performance groups including Les Trotteuses, Feu Moyen, Loop- loupe, Ana Colute, and Les actionnaires, she was a research artist with the Arthésis sound research group at ENSA Bourges between 2016 and 2018.She was also a member of Ergastule (Nancy), the Werkstadt e.V. and the Frauen Museum Berlin. 
In 2025, she had a solo show at Studio Rozalia in Gdynia (pl) in the frame of Architecture week-end with the support of Pilecki Institut of Berlin and her first solo release with Klappkart editions. I2023, she was awarded the ARIE 2023 residency program at the A4 Museum in Chengdu, and she had solo exhibition (Gh-ostalgies) at the Laznia contemporary art center. 2022, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy invited her to present her monographic exhibition Concentration.

Her pieces and performances are regularly presented in France: MUDAAC Epinal, Ergastule, Frac Lorraine, Magasin des Horizon in Grenoble, CND in Pantin, Centre Pompidou, but also in Europe: Akouphène festival, Cave12 in Geneva, Gothenburg Biennial, Soundseeing festival with Stiftung Künstler*dorf Schöppingen, Galerie Mario Mazzoli, mex Dortmund, Noiseberg Berlin and nyMussik in Bergen. Her work has been nominated for the Neuköllner Kunstpreis 2019 and the André Evard Prize 2016.

http://aureliepertusot.free.fr/NEWSITE/about.html
https://www.instagram.com/aurelie_pertusot/