Image: Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin
David L. Johnson’s ‘Nachtruhe’ is scheduled at Potsdamer Strasse from 11 September to 7 November 2026. Galerie Thomas Schulte will open the solo exhibition during Gallery Night on Thursday, 10 September, from 6 to 10pm, at its Potsdamer Strasse location in Berlin. The announcement therefore places the opening one day before the listed exhibition run begins.
‘Nachtruhe’ brings together sound works, sculpture and photography produced in and around public and private parks in Philadelphia, New York and Berlin. Across those three cities, Johnson’s work documents and intervenes in changing conditions of access to green space, examining how nighttime curfews and other forms of control shape the boundaries of public space.
In Philadelphia, the Department of Parks and Recreation has installed Mosquito devices in more than 30 parks and recreation centres since 2014. The sound deterrents emit high-frequency tones between 16 and 18.5 kilohertz, causing irritation and, in some cases, nausea with prolonged exposure. Although marketed as primarily affecting people under 25, the devices are often audible to a much broader group of listeners. The city states that they operate only during curfew hours, but some remain active throughout the day, making their sonic presence a permanent condition of several neighbourhood parks.
In New York, an attempt in 1988 to impose a nighttime curfew on Tompkins Square Park, then home to the city’s largest community of squatters, sparked protests met with widespread police violence. Three years later, the park was forcibly cleared and closed, followed by landscape and security renovations that enabled greater control over access.
In some instances, firms have illegally drilled or adhered patrol tags to trees and other city-owned property to verify guards’ rounds, extending private surveillance beyond the properties they are contracted to patrol.
