The liminal state of adolescence lingers in a bedroom. Encapsulating the intricate emotions of a confusing time, here, our identities have once formed. A place that is later often remembered with mixed feelings of nostalgia and relief, when confronted with the memory of a shameless exposure of our intimacy. A place where our social and political beings have taken shape, conforming to our environment, or rather, rebelling against it. Co-curated by Clémentine Proby and soft power the group exhibition Changing Room considers the teenage bedroom as a place of questions and reflections, imbalances and transformations. The exhibition brings together artists of different generations (born between 1978 and 2001) and their perspectives on teenagehood as a moment of formation and vulnerability — emphasizing the links between the physical and mental space that the teenage bedroom embodies.

Teenagers often give form to their world and their culture in a radical manner, while their urge to stand out is paradoxically accompanied by a desire to “fit in”. Echoing the rebellious tone and attitude of adolescent life, the videos by Maggie Lee take the form of diaristic collages documenting her years as a young Asian American out and about in the New Jersey suburbs. Displayed on small analogue monitors, the four short films evoke camcorder home videos as much as they resonate with a present documented and shared in snippets on social media. Inspired by Lee’s 2016 installation at the Whitney Museum in New York – where her film Mommy (2012–2015) was framed by a personalised family altar arranged in a notoriously recognizable white shelving unit – the exhibition design at soft power reflects on and questions the idea of a “universal” teenage experience by recreating a familiar domestic setting with IKEA’s ubiquitous “Billy” furniture.

The shelves structuring the exhibition act like standardised altars for small objects, meticulously kept and cherished. Like social media (TumblR then and TikTok today), they offer a grid that brings those life fragments together into an ordered mosaic: fanzines, customized clothes, drawings, videos, produced with a sense of urgency and a taste of DIY. The trio of works produced by Kim Petras Paintings for the exhibition draws from this impulse. Informed by the iconography of transgender German pop star Kim Petras (to whom the collective pays tribute to with its name), their playful sculptures draw on fandom and popular culture, and on games designed to explore attempts of reaching outward. Pendulum, dice, Magic 8 Balls – a quasi-spiritual search for connection with others, idols, or supernatural manifestations. Gathering with careful devotion a collection of personal souvenirs, Thomas Cap de Ville began his own archive in the 1990s, as if to map his experiences along the uncertain path towards adulthood. Photographs, flyers, fabrics, fragments accumulated over time, collaged with text and assembled with scissors and clear tape into handcrafted books that carry a religious aura. They are relics of his youth, and a testimony to coming of age as a young gay man in a decade haunted by AIDS and death – but also charged with friendship, love, and a fierce sense of freedom.

In a similar fashion, Anaïs Fontanges hoards images from advertising, pop culture, dreams, thoughts, and emotions, which she reshuffles into colourful and expressive drawings steeped in a surrealist visual language. Some are doodled, others attentively composed. Herself and her own body recur as the main subject of her work, shaped by but also resisting society’s toxic and normative projections of femininity. BE NICE (2025) is a self-portrait: the artist is nude, her belly button pierced with a cannabis leaf, her hands adorned with rings. The composition is intimate and performative. A literal and symbolic act of navel-gazing that captures the narcissistic as much as self-conscious process of becoming an adult. The exhibition’s title, Changing Room, toys with this ambivalence, while also conjuring the rituals of shopping and its gendered connotations; of high school girls in high street stores, watching themselves and each other in the mirror. The teenage bedroom functions in a similar way: a space to try things on, to look at oneself, to assess and transform; a space for trials, errors, identity rehearsals. Like adolescence, it can be a threshold. You enter as one thing and exit as another. Arash Nassiri’s ghostly doll houses here seem to strangely embody this in-betweenness that characterizes teenagehood – still innocent and child-like yet haunted by the standardisation and normativeness requested by adulthood. Nassiri’s monochrome grey houses resemble stereotypical Western middle-class family homes, while Tehranian shop signs adorn the buildings’ façades and exteriors, flickering across miniature-scale screens. Beyond the childish desire to play dream house, in this recontextualisation, “Polly Pocket” evokes a sense of austere melancholy.

The exhibition reflects on the bedroom as a space where the self is produced between longing expectations and the reality of life; between what and whom we assimilate to and the ideals we nurture. This room is both a space of daydreams and of nightmares. Throughout the last years, Marius Meyer-Jens has created an ongoing series of paintings of teeth: a recurring dream, and indeed a recurring motif throughout the exhibition. While these image sections may remind some of the traumatic experience of going to the orthodontist for a painfully self-conscious period of adolescence, dreams involving teeth are said to often symbolize change and personal growth as well as feelings of loss, transience, or a need for control in your waking life. Reflecting on the dreamstate as a moment of formation and vulnerability, Ash Love ’s hanging sculpture conveys a feeling of innocence and the need to be reassured; the attempt to create a safe and enveloping space. Made from a discarded, outgrown, single bed frame adorned with body “decorations” like piercings, hair-pins or chokers, the metal grid is reminiscent of a dreamcatcher, a hair strainer in the shower, a street gutter, or a filter: which of the dreams we once had of who we wanted to become have ever materialised outside these four walls? Which part of our teenage selves would we want to let slip out?

Text von Clémentine Proby & Linnéa Bake