The Heart is a Pump is an exhibition project that takes its name after a poem by Bob Flanagan. It evolves across three parts with attending film screenings and conversations, exploring the motifs of pain, repetition and submission in Christian iconography and beyond.

The exhibition project is open Saturdays from 12–5 pm through June as part of the residency in the space at Keithstraße. Please refer to the chronology below for special opening hours, event dates, and further information.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen
The Heart is a Pump
until 28 June, 2026

Residency Space
Keithstraße 15
10787 Berlin

Opening Hours
Saturdays, 12–5 pm

Kristian Vistrup Madsen is a writer and curator based in Berlin. In 2025, he curated Mood Curriculum, a series of events and podcasts at Simian in Copenhagen that sought to define the notion of Stimmung as essential to artistic and curatorial practice.

A programme of short film curated by James Richards and Kristian Vistrup Madsen with works by Bob Flanagan, Axel Petersén, Steve Reinke, Atalia ten Brink, Kathy Acker, Wiktor Grodecki, Anne McGuire and more.

An exhibition with new works by Rochelle Goldberg, Alexander Tovborg and Frederik Worm, curated by Kristian Vistrup Madsen. 

"'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' 
There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine." 
(Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace) 

With works by Rochelle Goldberg and Alexander Tovborg
curated by Kristian Vistrup Madsen

"It is about pleasure, jouissance, denigration, the wounds that one inflicts on oneself?" (Catherine Breillat, I Only Believe in Myself)

Works by Rochelle Goldberg and Alexander Tovborg

With Kristian Vistrup Madsen, Izabella Scott, Alexander Tovborg

After an introduction by Kristian Vistrup Madsen, author Izabella Scott will be in conversation about her book The Bed Trick (Atlantic, 2026). She will then speak to artist Alexander Tovborg about his suite of works for The Divine Comedy (Strandberg Publishing, 2025). 

Download exhibition flyer

An exhibition with works by Rochelle Goldberg and Rosa Aiello, Texts by Bob Flanagan and Georges Didi-Huberman. Curated by Kristian Vistrup Madsen.

“Almost nothing was visible, that is to say: already something other than nothing was visible in that almost. One actually saw, then, something else, simply in the looking forward to it or the desiring of it.”
– Georges Didi-Huberman, The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)

Download exhibition flyer
Download list of works

Works by Rochelle Goldberg and Rosa Aiello, Texts by Bob Flanagan and Georges Didi-Huberman.