Chain-link fences are paradoxical structures: thin metal veils that divide and connect; they create boundaries while remaining porous. In Adam Fearon's hands, these everyday barriers become portals into Berlin’s fractured soul, transformed through paint into vibrant testimonies of resistance and memory. His latest series and installation, Parade, emerges from Berlin’s hyperstitious terrain, where past and present collide in a continuous struggle over power and belonging.
Fearon works with the fence surrounding Tempelhofer Feld. The site, once a Prussian parade ground, a concentration camp for homosexuals, an airport, an American military base, a refugee camp, is now a contested development site. His large-scale paintings pulse with the site’s layered histories. He reveals the means by which power is embedded in mundane urban elements, how what recedes from our attention still orchestrates our movements, possibilities, and limits.
Fig. 1
Evolving from intimate portraiture to expansive, spatial meditations, Fearon’s works focus on what he calls the “spaces between action”: the peripheral, the marginal, the unnoticed. This resonates with Sara Ahmed’s notion of queer phenomenology, which urges us to attend to the background, not as a passive setting, but as an active force shaping how bodies orient themselves in space.
In Parade, the grid of the fence functions simultaneously as an architectural tool and carceral structure, shaping both physical environments and social relations. These chain-link forms, light, open, and symbolically divisive, reinforce the fiction of borders through their intricate metal weave. Fearon calls them “nets made for capture”, tools of separation and control. Yet his paintings also reveal their instability. The fence, despite its intent, allows the gaze to slip through, subtly destabilizing the divisions it enforces. Bent by climbing bodies or easily cut, these fences remain semi-permeable, separating without obscuring, containing without asserting total control.
Fearon engages these structures at the micro-level of urban planning, where division technologies segregate neighborhoods and delineate zones of speculation. His practice becomes a form of cartography, urgent, critical, and affective. In Parade, his shift toward abstraction is not an escape from politics, but rather a deeper immersion. Repeating the fence pattern over weeks of painting, he reveals a tension between the idealised and the materialized. Human presence, a tremor in the hand, interrupts the grid’s perfection, transforming repetition into meditation.
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Parade is also a meditation on translation: on how three-dimensional barriers materialize ideological violence, and how the act of painting them becomes an attempt at integration rather than alienation. Through paint and metal, Fearon braids past and present into works alive with Berlin’s contradictions, making visible the ongoing struggles over space, belonging, movement, and the right to stay, to inhabit, and to reclaim land from occupying forces.
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- Image credits
Cover: Photographer Franziska Von Stenglin (@franziska_stenglin).
Fig. 1: Adam Fearon, PARADE I +II (Feld), 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Kinderhook & Caracas. Photo: Joe Clark;
Fig. 2: Adam Fearon, PARADE III (Tor), 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Kinderhook & Caracas. Photo: Joe Clark.
