Niklas Hanitsch

For most of my life there has been an artist sleeping inside me, buried beneath career, intellect, and the steady pressure to be sensible. I have always loved art, collected it, felt moved by it, but I kept my own impulses hidden. I feared judgement, the quiet accusation of being self indulgent or cringe, the discomfort of revealing something real.

Only in the last years, through a slow and sometimes painful process of individuation, did something begin to shift. Creation asks for honesty. It asks for risk. To make anything at all, you first have to dissolve the fear of being seen. Eventually the inner pressure became too strong to ignore, and what had been dormant demanded form.

My background as a software entrepreneur, the proximity to artificial intelligence, and the steady hum of sociopolitical anxiety created a kind of internal tension I could no longer hold privately. So I allowed it to leak into material. What emerged was a world that resembles our own, but darker, stripped of its comforting illusions. A world where dignity is fragile, technology is sacred, and escape often comes through numbness.

Together with two artist friends from Berlin, André Harke and Hagen von Tulien, I organized my first exhibition. More than a hundred people came over two days. It was overwhelming and strangely intimate at the same time.

The following is not an attempt to decode the pieces, but to accompany them with a few quiet reflections. Much of what art means happens in the viewer anyway. I only describe what moved through me while creating them.

The following is a summary and description of the works I have exhibited:

Mother is the Name of God on the Lips and Hearts of All Children

This piece began as a circular gradient, white at the center fading into green and then into black, almost like a slow eclipse. On top of that simple field sits a Death’s Head Hawkmoth, surrounded by four black butterflies. There is something about the stillness of insects that feels both innocent and unsettling at once. The arrangement reminds me of beginnings, of what nurtures us, and of the moments when protection turns into something more complicated.

Dawn of Tech Hearts

A laptop became the canvas. On the screen, a red moth appears as if emerging from digital code. The keys are altered with demonic runes and symbols and carry traces of fingerprints, like remnants of a ritual performed in secrecy. When I worked on it, I kept thinking about how easily machines slip into the role of confidant, oracle, or escape hatch. The piece holds that tension without trying to resolve it.

Soul Harvester

A floating structure hovers over a barren landscape, and a pale tree reaches toward it. The architecture feels cold, maybe even indifferent, but the entire scene has an almost vulnerable silence to it. Sometimes the way technology expands feels like this to me, suspended above the places where life struggles to take root.

The Device Has Been Modified

Summoning Irreversible Dictatorship

An altar of objects, both digital and symbolic. Candles, tools, a laptop showing code and the pixelated shape of a moth. It is not meant to be dramatic. More like a quiet question about the systems we invite into our lives, sometimes out of convenience, sometimes out of hope.

Where to Go?

A sequence of silhouettes from ape to human to someone bent over, dissolving into addiction. I didn’t want to moralize. It just felt honest to acknowledge how progress carries both ascent and collapse inside it, depending on where you look. I censored the last picture of a fentanyl addict bent into the so called fentanyl fold here for my blog, to respect the person’s privacy, even though you cannot recognize him in the original either. But showing it online still felt wrong.

Cut It Out of Me! (Video Installation)

A robotic dog tries to escape its cage. It moves mechanically, almost desperately. Watching it, I felt a mix of pity and recognition. Sometimes our own patterns feel like that, repetitive and exhausting, as if we were trying to break out of something without knowing what the walls are made of.

Each piece in this exhibition came from a place I had avoided for years. Not darkness for its own sake, but the part of the psyche that becomes visible only when you stop pretending. The recurring motif of the Death’s Head Moth was not a deliberate choice at first, but it grew into a symbol of transformation for me, especially the uncomfortable kind.

Art, for me, has become a way to document these shifts. Not decoration, not explanation, but an attempt to manifest something internal before it slips back into silence. Creating these works felt like resurfacing from a long period of suppression. A kind of emergence. A necessary one.

The vernissage was not meant to comfort. It was a moment of exposure, for me and maybe for those who saw the pieces. Standing there, I realized that expressing fear does not strengthen it. It transforms it. Light enters through the cracks you try hardest to hide.

Through this exhibition I learned that creation and destruction are not opposites. They are companions. What falls away is illusion. What remains is Will, sharpened by contact with the truth.

I had not descended into the dark.
I had illuminated it from within.

From the dark light group exhibition