The mirrors do not return your image. They fracture it, scatter it, let it corrode. In Edgar Arceneaux’s hands, silver becomes unstable, alive—peeled away from glass, pressed onto canvas, refusing to settle into clarity. He calls it skinning the mirror.

For more than two decades, Arceneaux has moved between drawing, performance, film, and installation, creating works where history and the present overlap. With Shards, opening at 68projects during Berlin Art Week 2025, he brings his mirror paintings to the city for the first time. The exhibition is the result of a residency that began with something almost mundane – hunting for mirrors in Berlin – and unfolded into a body of work that holds chemistry, politics, and atmosphere within its fragile surfaces.

vakuum spoke with him just before the opening.

I started working with glass back in the early 2000s, around 2001 or 2002. I even made glass out of sugar, working with sugar crystals. I began working with mirrors later, around 2012 or 2013. At first, I was using them simply as materials – glass attached to silver – but I became frustrated with how rigid they were. That rigidity closed doors for me at the time. The mirrors felt fixed, and I was looking for something more unstable, more alive.

The stripping itself is chemical. I use paint stripper to remove the backing paint, which is straightforward but physically demanding. The skinning process is where the alchemy begins.

I paint on the back of the mirror, directly on the silver – scratching, digging, breaking, building up layers over time. Once I feel the surface is ready, I press a wet canvas onto it. When it dries, the skinning begins. The magic is that the front of the painting for you is the back for me. That inversion fascinates me. Most of my labor only becomes visible when the silver rips or thins and the color pushes through. Paint expresses itself in the cracks and gaps of the broken glass. It pushes from the back into the front. I love the idea that something hidden insists on being known, insists on entering the foreground.

It depends on the city. In Berlin, for example, I wanted to see how the proteins floating in the air would bond with the silver. That reaction tells me how the painting evolves. I compare that with other places—the colors, the textures, the patterns. Sometimes I know in advance how long a canvas needs. Other times I look at a painting and realize it just needs more time. A year, two, maybe even five. That’s part of the journey I’ve been on these last years: giving the work the time it demands, letting the air, the place, the environment become part of it.

If devotion means commitment to the process, then yes, it’s the rule. The process isn’t a set of rules, but conditions under which I make choices. Those choices might feel casual or intentional, but they produce a range of results. Part of it is learning to let go. Control is really more of a dance, a rhythm you have with the material. It can’t be forced. It has to be a negotiation, a rhythm you enter into with the work. Hopefully you end up with something you expect, and hopefully something that blows your mind.

Mirrors are inversion – what’s left is right, what’s right is left. Our sense of how people see us is dictated by that. The iPhone has changed things, but it’s still optics, not the same as mirrors. Personally, I don’t look at mirrors closely anymore. Only for necessity – shaving, checking my hair. I stopped using them to see myself. I prefer to see my reflection in relationships, in the eyes of the people around me.

Berlin mirrors are very different. They stopped using real silver decades ago. I arrived open to the experience, but the first part of my residency here was mirror hunting – testing, comparing, experimenting. The composition is different. Maybe more like silver paint with some silver in it, but not the same as in the U.S. The reflection is different, the material behaves differently. It’s possible the mirrors here won’t oxidize at all. That’s the risk, but also the experiment.

I live in America, where authoritarian government is on the rise, as in many Western nations. It’s the chickens coming home to roost. The way the U.S. has treated other nations is now mirrored at home – suppressing labor, using the police to crack down, billionaires growing richer while others stagnate or fall behind. That’s not just politics, that’s our current reality. The roots go back decades. Ronald Reagan gave birth to Donald Trump, and that presence is still alive. My work is political in that it recognizes how the present is shaped by the fog of history, by ripple effects from the past.

I try to make work that reveals things across three scales: the individual, the family body, and the social body. Conflicts arise across all three. My goal is to create windows where you understand something personally, relationally, and societally at the same time. That alignment – that’s the sweet spot for storytelling.

To stand before Arceneaux’s mirrors is to encounter instability. The surface no longer reflects a clean image – fractures, corrodes, and insists on its own life. His canvases breathe with the air of the city, absorb its chemistry, its politics, its time. That is why this exhibition should not be missed. Shards is not simply a set of paintings, but an unfolding of time itself: beauty meeting ruin, devotion leaning into doubt, history breaking open in the present.

On September 10, Arceneaux will perform the act of skinning live for the first time in Berlin, opening the exhibition with gesture and process. From then until October 25, Shards inhabits 68projects, Galerie Kornfeld – an invitation to step into the cracks of silver and see what insists on coming through.