“There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” (Octavia E. Butler, unpublished epigram for The Parable of the Trickster) We have become witness to a world that seems to be perpetually ending. In her solo exhibition Nothing New Under the Sun, Mariona Berenguer invites us to dwell inside the cyclical momentum of existence—a moment thick with exhaustion, where endings accumulate not as singular events but as steady erosions. From the quiet collapse of routines to the slow violence of ecological decay, the works on display chart the contours of a world on edge; and yet, they refuse to surrender to fatalism. Instead, they propose a subtle recalibration—towards flickering forms of endurance that persist when everything else seems to fall away. The exhibition ticks to the rhythm of Clockwise (Head, 2025), a sculptural installation of four sunflowers cast in wax. Their spiky heads seem frozen in motion, arrested in mid-bloom or mid-decline. Wax, with its potential for both preservation and combustion, becomes here a material of ambiguous temporality. A recurring symbol in Berenguer’s practice, the sunflowers allude to bodies under strain, caught in a relentless cycle that no longer holds the promise of renewal. By the entrance, a fifth wax sunflower lies toppled, its head pressed against the shop window, melting steadily under the eyes of passers-by. Whether felled by fatigue or force, it holds its ground. Berenguer’s sculptural and graphic works trace the shapes of repetition—not as stasis, but as pulse. Her exhibition is animated by the interplay of ends and endlessness in which human life unfolds. At issue, here, is not whether and when things come to an end, but how we move within and beyond these endings. Beneath this question lies an undercurrent of persistence; after all, energy is never lost, only transformed. The three drawings 5 Billion Years (2025) are named after the projected lifespan of our sun—a celestial end that is at once too distant to comprehend and too vast to ignore. In these works, a black void ruptures a wax-yellow surface, from which lines burst outward. Like solar flares, they oscillate between flame and fire, origin and aftermath. The sense of imminent catastrophe is underscored by the sculpture Frohes neues Jahr (2025). A burnt waste container, salvaged from the streets of Neukölln, has been spray-painted black. Affixed to the wall like a monumental fossil, it testifies to a destructive outburst—but also, perhaps, to a cathartic release. An object designed to contain and (re)cycle excess has been consumed by it. And yet, in its charred surface and monochrome severity, it is reinvigorated as an artwork. Elsewhere, in the series Insomnia (2023), it is also residues that take shape. Each of the six gouache drawings depicts the projected shadows of sunflowers in various states of decay. Once attuned to the sun’s daily rhythm, the plants now appear detached, their shadows unmoored from a source of light and of life. Painted meticulously by hand, the works echo the visual language of digital printing, but their outlines became blurred by smudges of sponge, suggesting smoke or breath. Produced during long nights of anxious solitude, their title evokes not just a disruption of sleep but a deeper existential restlessness. This gesture of attending to shadow, of tuning into the presence within absence, is a key concern in Berenguer’s artistic practice. In this exhibition, the sun is no longer a reliable constant, but an unstable metaphor for other endings. Against the backdrop of exhausted systems and tired narratives, it is precisely in the impasse—in the sleepless nights, scorched materials, and broken cycles—that we begin to imagine not what comes after the end, but another kind of ongoingness. Even though there might be nothing new under the sun, to evoke Octavia E. Butler, there may be new suns. Text by Lisa Deml