Photographer Spyros Rennt Invites Us to Kiss to Resist

Spyros Rennt, To Kiss Against the Fire, Exhibition view, Rosegarden, 2025, Photo: Joanna Wilk @joanna__wilk

By RAFAEL SERGI May 22, 2025

It’s no secret we are living through dark times—so dark that the proverbial ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ feels like a fairytale. In this bleakness, where hard-won rights and certainties seem to be slipping away before our eyes in favour of the return of conservative, anti-LGBTQ+ narratives, Greek photographer – and Berliner by adoption – Spyros Rennt offers a response of disarming simplicity: to kiss.

With his most extensive exhibition to date, To Kiss Against the Fire – inaugurated in early May at the new Rosegarden cultural space, situated in the pulsating heart gallery scene of Berlin’s Potsdamer Straße – Rennt takes a resolute stand within an art world that, in a time of global fracture, often chooses to look away. A time when the cries of a shattered world grow ever louder – perhaps especially for those who pretend not to hear them.

Amid the fractures of a Berlin hurtling toward everything it once stood against, Rennt draws inspiration from American artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, positioning his work at the intersection of vulnerability and political urgency. It’s a deliberate shift that also marks a clear evolution from his earlier focus on the excesses of Berlin’s queer nightlife – a scene once central to his sight, and now reframed through a deeper lens.

Spanning eight years of photographic work and four books, the exhibition unfolds as an emotional journey through diverse cities – from Berlin to Athens, New York to São Paulo – all connected by one of the defining features of Rennt’s practice, and one of the most essential aspects of the human experience: intimacy. Conceived as a crescendo of emotion across three rooms, the show makes clear from the outset that Rennt’s images reject spectacle and staging in favour of a constant negotiation between visibility and care. His photographs emerge from exchange, never appropriation: his subjects are loved ones – whether lifelong companions or brief encounters – yet the bond is so palpable that, in looking at them, we too feel drawn into their orbit.

Spyros Rennt, To Kiss Against the Fire, Exhibition view, Rosegarden, 2025, Photo: Joanna Wilk @joanna__wilk

The long corridor reflects this quality in particular: the works are small in scale, mostly portraits, evoking a sense of intimacy and closeness. The scenes are familiar, idyllic, tender. A ginger-haired head rests gently in a friend’s hands on the beach; a tattooed short-haired girl leans topless against a wall; a trans boy poses proudly, shirtless; voluptuous girls appear both fierce and vulnerable. And they’re not the only ones: vulnerability seems to be a shared condition among Rennt’s subjects, even when they seem invincible. It is no vulnerability in a victimising way, rather a deeply intimate one. It is written in their eyes.

The second room is where everything – or almost everything – unfolds. It pulses with movement, dynamism, and visceral energy. It radiates a joyous sense of reclamation: in their fragility, the subjects unapologetically claim their very own space. Queerness, nightlife, pride, bodies, twisted poses, and kisses pressed against walls — Rennt’s universe converges into a harmonious vision where the only thing that truly matters is letting go. Moments of tenderness, embraces, and nude swims in the sea are elevated into frames where intimacy, in its most natural and genuine form, takes on infinite shapes. The bodies portrayed – not exclusively queer, but unmistakably outsiders – do not perform for the gaze. They simply exist. And it is precisely within this quiet, everyday existence – in a world that insists on conforming whatever falls outside dominant norms – that the political force, and the true essence, of Rennt’s work comes into focus.

The smaller room is the most intimate, centred on the colour blue—both literally and emotionally. It offers a kind of invitation to stillness, a pause after the explosive chaos of the central room.

Spyros Rennt, To Kiss Against the Fire, Exhibition view, Rosegarden, 2025, Photo: Joanna Wilk @joanna__wilk

It is worth noting once more the apparent evolution in Rennt’s work, which the show makes particularly clear. Those who know his practice closely can easily grasp the shift in his focus from his earlier production. His first book, Another Excess – as the title itself suggests – centered on a more voyeuristic dimension of queer experience, often filtered through the euphoria of gay bodies and excess. In To Kiss Against the Fire, by contrast, gay sexuality is almost absent, giving way to a broader and more inclusive representation of queer experience—one rooted in intimacy, tenderness, and shared humanity. It is no longer about transgression, but about everything that connects us in the common experience of affection.

The show also captures a Berlin that slips away, that fades. The faces and places it preserves—some now shuttered, others swallowed by gentrification—form an emotional archive of the city, especially its queer dimensions. There is no nostalgia, only clarity: each photograph is an act of preservation. If an image sparks a sense of connection, then that space, in some way, still exists.

With this exhibition, Rennt invites us to perceive, to remember, to feel—not only what has been, but what still burns: in bodies, in desires, in connections that endure. An exhibition that speaks softly, yet leaves a mark. A claim for space and visibility against cultural erasure. It gently urges us to resist, at a time when—perhaps more than ever—it is easy to succumb to despair.

To Kiss Against the Fire, Spyros Rennt, runs from May 3-30, 2025 at Rosegarden by Frontrose, Berlin

Spyros Rennt, To Kiss Against the Fire, Exhibition view, Rosegarden, 2025, Photo: Joanna Wilk @joanna__wilk