FIRE is the second exhibition in the City Curator series From the Cosmos to the Commons: Five Years – Five Elements. The series focuses on the elemental forces of Cosmos (2025), Fire (2026), Air (2027), Earth (2028), and Water (2029), dedicating one year to each. Together, they invite us to look toward the horizon of a planetary public sphere, guided by a sense of the "not-yet", a felt awareness of what might emerge.

FIRE engages with the origins of the term “apocalypse,” derived from the Greek Apokalypsis (ἀποκάλυψις), meaning “revealing” or “uncovering”. In this sense, the apocalypse is not a distant event but an ongoing condition. Beyond Western frameworks, Indigenous communities and other historically marginalized peoples have long used apocalyptic narratives to describe experiences of world-ending trauma, including colonization, displacement, and ecological devastation. 

FIRE presents a series of public art commissions by artists based in Hamburg and internationally, offering its political, ecological, and spiritual readings at a time of profound urgency. Our ancestors at some point learned to domesticate the over present fire. Today, we simultaneously contain and unleash it: mastering combustion while continuing to burn fossil fuels day and night, exhausting the planet’s resources and climate. FIRE addresses the pervasive feeling of impending catastrophe while asking how poison might become medicine, confusion a strength, and loss a source of renewal and resilience.

The project takes place at the St. Nikolai Memorial, a former church in the heart of Hamburg that was twice destroyed by fire during its history. Never rebuilt after World War II, it is now a site of remembrance and encounter, offering space to learn about the causes and consequences of war. It links the memory of destruction and irreparable loss with hope and a collective will to repair. In this context, the contemporary artworks function as “unrehearsed encounters,” reflecting on how to break the cycle of destruction and renewal and move toward forms of planetary coexistence grounded in care, justice, and nonviolence.