Lina Lapelytė Builds Time With 400,000 Cubes in ‘We Make Years Out of Hours’

Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė created an ambitious temporal installation at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof titled "We Make Years Out of Hours," assembling 400,000 wooden cubes into a sprawling sculptural environment that transformed the museum's historic hall into a meditation on time, labor, and collective experience.

The work transcended traditional sculpture by incorporating weekly performances rooted in poetry. Lapelytė's installation engaged visitors in sustained contemplation of duration and repetition, using the sheer accumulation of modest materials to register the weight of accumulated hours and their transformation into years. The cube-based structure created both architectural presence and metaphorical density.

Commissioned by the CHANEL Next Prize, the exhibition ran through January 10, 2027, positioning Lapelytė within contemporary art's growing interest in durational practice and manual labor as aesthetic and conceptual material. Her approach recalls the minimalist and process-based traditions of artists like Donald Judd and Carl Andre, but inflects that lineage with performative and poetic dimensions that emphasize human presence and time spent within the work.

The weekly performances grounded the installation in lived experience rather than static form. By anchoring the sculptural environment to recurring events tied to language and voice, Lapelytė resisted the monumentalizing impulse that such material accumulation might suggest. The poetry-based performances articulated what the cubes alone could only imply: the emotional and linguistic textures of temporal passage.

This commission reflects the luxury house's investment in contemporary visual culture through the CHANEL Next Prize, positioning fashion capital alongside institutional support for ambitious artistic experimentation. Lapelytė's installation demonstrated how conceptual rigor and immersive scale operate at the intersection of minimalism, performance, and archival thinking, creating an environment where viewers became participants in measuring time's passage.