Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė transformed Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof into a meditative space exploring time and collective labor through "We Make Years Out of Hours," a major installation commissioned by the CHANEL Next Prize. The exhibition features 400,000 hand-placed wooden cubes arranged across the museum's historic hall, creating an immersive landscape that functions simultaneously as sculpture, performance venue, and architectural intervention.
The work directly engages with duration and repetition as artistic materials. Weekly performances grounded in poetry activate the space, turning the installation into a living document of labor and shared experience. Lapelytė's approach echoes conceptual practices that prioritize process over finished object, though her scale and ambition push toward something more experiential and communal.
The CHANEL Next Prize commission signals the luxury house's continued investment in contemporary art that operates outside traditional commercial galleries. Chanel has positioned itself as a patron of conceptually rigorous work, and Lapelytė's installation aligns with that strategy. Her practice resists easy commercialization. The wooden cube matrix reads as both minimalist abstraction and as a visceral record of human effort, each cube representing hours of assembly and intention.
Lapelytė, known for multimedia works that blend performance, sound design, and visual art, brings her multidisciplinary sensibility to this monumental scale. The exhibition ran through January 10, 2027, allowing audiences extended time to experience how light, bodies, and sound interact within the cube field across seasons and weeks.
This commission reflects broader industry trends toward experiential luxury patronage. Fashion houses increasingly fund installations and performances as cultural capital, positioning themselves as taste-makers beyond product. Lapelytė's work, with its emphasis on collective time and labor, speaks to contemporary concerns about value, human effort, and shared meaning in an accelerated