There is a particular kind of looking reserved for shop windows. Schaufenster, in German, names something quite literal—a window for looking. A product of modern consumer culture, the shop window was designed to capture the gaze of the passerby, transforming attention into desire, desire into currency, and consumption into a promise of pleasure and individuality.

At the threshold between looking and being looked at, the window occupies an ambiguous territory between the public and the private – much like the former hotel window on Kalkreuthstraße, which for decades has looked out onto the layered history of Nollendorfkiez.

The exhibition takes its title from the French idiom for window-shopping, faire du lèche-vitrine — literally, "to lick the windows" — and from Aphex Twin's 1999 track of the same name, whose video, directed by Chris Cunningham, restages the idiom as a ten-minute parody of the American music-video industry: two men cruise the street window-shopping for women, whose faces are, one after another, replaced by an identical, grinning mask. What begins as satire ends as diagnosis — desire flattened into an interchangeable, mass-produced surface, precisely the condition this exhibition takes as its subject.

The window is an invitation to look, and it is the very promise its objects hold out to the passerby that forms the point of departure of Windowlicker, an exhibition bringing together works by ten artists: Leda Bourgogne, Giovanni Casu, Mehdi Görbüz, Edgar Herbst, Alexander Hidalgo, Alexander Klaubert, Victoria Pidust, Martin Eugen Raabenstein, Josefine Reisch, Lou Savoir. Moving through questions of public display, consumer fetishism, voyeurism, and freedom of expression, the works displayed in the Schaufenster stage a paradox: how do objects come to embody the myths and desires projected onto them—and how, in turn, do they mirror these projections back to us, making us, in the process, as much a product as what is on display?

Not only the window but the objects themselves become a surface of projection, one that returns our gaze. Walter Benjamin traced a version of this same reversal to the flâneur, the urban stroller who walks the street purely to look, without any real intention to buy — and who, for that very reason, is, in his words, "no buyer... he is the merchandise." Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), named the larger condition: life as "an immense accumulation of spectacles," image detached from life and returned to us as representation. The mannequins on view — lifelike, motionless, displayed without will — only make literal a condition visible from the other side of the glass: that we, too, are, in some sense, ‘Fensterpuppen’, puppets of industry.

The desire a window sells is rarely only domestic. Wilhelm von Gloeden's staged, classicising photographs of Sicilian youth, made for a foreign clientele in the late nineteenth century, are among the earliest templates for selling a body, or a place, as image to a distant buyer — what Roland Barthes, resisting the word "art," called simply "a force," a naïveté "awe-inspiring as a feat of valour." Hans Magnus Enzensberger was blunter about where this leads: tourism, he wrote, is "one of the great nihilistic movements," a slime that makes it "impossible to distinguish Cairo from Honolulu." A handful of storefront travel agencies, holdovers from an earlier Berlin, still sell this same promise in their windows: elsewhere, packaged and displayed.

Kraftwerk knew this feeling too, and gave it a body: "Schaufensterpuppen," the 1977 track from Trans-Europa-Express, imagines the band itself frozen behind glass, and on Mensch-Maschine that ambivalence between rigidity and movement becomes fully programmatic — the dummy resolves into the robot, discomfort cools into pose.

Across the works in Windowlicker, this same logic returns in different guises: a face doubling as a mask across three enticing women — crowned as female legends on screen and paper; a dismantled body, its carved wooden fragments laid out behind glass as if freshly excavated — Duchamp's vitrine restaged as an archaeological dig; an apple blossom, photographed in such close abstraction it turns to flesh, carrying the erotic charge of the fruit still to come; a body that refuses the sold, perfected version of itself; clothes picked up off Berlin's streets now relics sealed in glass tubes; an inherited curtain, its transparent surface that becomes its own window, blurring rather than revealing the flawed, no less manmade structures we build inside ourselves; a serpent, betrayed, who forgives — and holds up, in the end, a mirror we cannot help but look into.