For Spike’s 14th artist talk at Soho House Berlin, and occasioned by the world premiere of his film 

 at the Berlinale, Assaf Gruber scored the ebb and flow of local and global social change across his work, as he tries to balance the weighty histories of art and cinema and the utter madness of life in 2025. 

 (*1980, Jerusalem) is a sculptor and filmmaker living and working in Berlin. Juxtaposing materiality, narrative, and the fictional spaces that arise in between, his art-making is a language of tensions between movement and stillness, spoken to pull apart the thick, opaque mass fusing people and culture to the institutions that might represent them. Solo exhibitions include Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2018) and the Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2015). His films have been featured at the Berlinale Film Festival (2016) and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023).