The Antichurch

Can patriarchal violence be purged from our collective bodies? The white father, the priest and the statesman, preaching from their nationalist pulpits continue to be celebrated by the masses. Within this barefaced crowd of worshippers bodies press up against one another. The sexual politics of fascism can be felt in a communion of ecstatic repression that lashes out at all heretics. The religion of colonial capitalism, in its many mutations, continues its criminal rampage against a rising majority of non-believers. They, in turn, are defacing the old pale gods and their fundamentalism, vandalizing their cathedrals, proclaiming that their statues will also die. The clergymen warn that this pagan enemy is powerful, invisible, and everywhere, and fortunately they are. Confronting the new theocrats and their followers, their murderous histories, stand those who fight back by simply living their lives. Their very existence is an exercise of survival, manifested in the everyday struggles occurring at this very moment all over the planet: Lullabies sung by elders, insurgencies woven by Indigenous women, children torn from their mothers finding new kinships. Emancipatory cosmologies and sexualities create personal and collective antichurches, queer and transfeminist temples, which confront the tactics of fear and fanaticism spread by the autocrats and their macabre processions. They say, “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn.” They perform rituals of feminist solidarities. They invent matriarchal alliances of rebellious mourning. They share their vulnerability and their stories. They are spiritual healers. And, they are always many, never just one.

With works and contributions by:

Marwa Arsanios; Shuvinai Ashoona; Paula Baeza Pailamilla; Virginia Borges, Gil DuOdé, and Virginia de Medeiros; Cansu Çakar; Edgar Calel (in collaboration with Fernando Pereira dos Santos); Flávio de Carvalho; Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide); Kiri Dalena; Zehra Doğan; El Palomar, Brenda V. Fajardo; Galli; Christine Meisner; Małgorzata Mirga-Tas; Pedro Moraleida Bernardes; Óscar Fernando Morales Martínez; Carlos Motta; Florencia Rodriguez Giles; Mariela Scafati; Young-jun Tak; Teatro da Vertigem; Elena Tejada-Herrera; The Black Mamba – Natasha Mendonca & Suman Sridhar; and Azucena Vieites

About the venue:

Since its inception in the early 1990s, KW Institute for Contemporary Art has devoted itself to the central questions of our times through the production, presentation, and dissemination of contemporary art. The Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, which was launched soon after, emerged from a pressing desire for an extensive dialogue with the international discourse around contemporary art. In addition to other venues across the city the Berlin Biennale has been working with KW’s exhibition space since it’s inauguration. Numerous outstanding artists and internationally renowned curators have since realized important new works and exhibition projects there, establishing the two institutions located under the roof of KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. as vibrant venues for progressive artistic practices, both within the Berlin art scene and internationally.

Storefront for Dissident Bodies

Cities are not made of buildings, but of soft bodies in movement and their cartographies of affect. The clothing we wear helps us make, inhabit, and transform space. Is it possible to wear a place one wants to go to? Is it possible to dress oneself into the collective bodies we desire? Welcome to the storefront for rebel bodies and their choreographies of disarmament. Prêt-à-porter architecture for vulnerable movements and their politics of fashion, tearing down the hypersexualized normalcy of department-store season collections. Clothing as a second skin of protection and care, exposing the masquerades of birth and biological givens. Dress and costume as a caressing flexible fortress, a room of one’s own. Trojan geese and opossums as gentle organic vessels from which to jump out of and dismantle the peddlers of corporate profit and rip apart the uniforms they impose. Outfits and prostheses as acts of love, ways of listening and being with each other and our surroundings. Clothing, coverings and uncoverings, as language and territory. White walls are softened, veiled, made light-reflexive, embracing all in their shimmery drag. This is a storefront for queer and dissident bodies and their fierce promenades.

With works by:

Edgar Calel, Francisco Copello, FCNN – Feminist Collective With No Name (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth/Anita Beikpour), with Neda Sanai, Andrés Fernández, Delaine Le Bas, Dana Michel and Tracy Maurice, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Solvognen (The Sun Chariot) Theater Group, and Osías Yanov and Sirenes Errantes

About the venue:

In 1965, with the help of the former West Berlin Senate, the DAAD [German Academic Exchange Service] took over the “artists-in-residence program” initiated two years earlier by the Ford Foundation. Under the new title “Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD” [DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program], it became a renowned support program for international artists, writers, and musicians, and later also for filmmakers. In 1978, the daadgalerie opened as a new exhibition venue in former West Berlin. The location was intended to bring together the diverse activities of the artists’ program and offer international guests a platform within the West German cultural scene. Since 2017, the daadgalerie has been located at Oranienstraße 161 in Kreuzberg in “Haus Stiller.” The residential and commercial building was designed in 1910 by the Jewish-Hungarian architect Oskar Kaufmann. Interdisciplinary exhibitions and events by current and former guests of the program are shown on two floors. A dialogue with the local art scene and other institutions in the city is the primary focus.

The Inverted Museum

How to grieve the loss of that which was never allowed to exist? All that was erased and silenced in the name of progress, of beauty, of the future? Museums have been built on such multiple deaths. Those pieces of worlds being broken, their looted belongings, continue to be displayed in small glass coffins. Unable to shake off their impulse to possess and incarcerate, museums eased into modernity by reaffirming that all knowledges are indebted to their “discoveries.” Hygienic white walls declared plagues and plantations a thing of the past. Clean slates and grand halls were built to celebrate their great men and their monumental art. Making things new as a way of fixing the past in a perpetual power relation to their present, highjacking temporality itself. But the stones remember the centuries of burning forests, of depleted lands and lives. They have been observing, and they know that time cannot be broken into a straight line. The ancient sounds of the birds, of the rivers and the rocks ripped from the ground roar over us. Those evicted from history do not ask for permission to exist, and they refuse to forget. They warn us that the dark smoke rising from the cracked mother earth poses dangers to all who inhabit her, that the falling sky is an imminent threat. Aware that these walls cannot contain their experiences or those of their murdered elders, they practice listening to heal the wound the world has become. Their stories of disappearance will be heard and felt. They demand neither inclusion nor new ideas but the unequivocal release of all hostages.

With works by:

Pacita Abad, Noor Abuarafeh, Shuvinai Ashoona, Aline Baiana, Deanna Bowen, Flávio de Carvalho, Cian Dayrit, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Francisco Huichaqueo, Käthe Kollwitz, La rara troupe, Mapa Teatro – Laboratorio de Artistas, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA), CL, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, Rio de Janeiro, BR, Museu de Arte Osório Cesar, Franco da Rocha, BR, Andrés Pereira Paz, Antonio Pichillá, Aykan Safoğlu, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Bartolina Xixa, and Katarina Zdjelar

About the venue:

In 1881, the Gropius Bau opened as a museum and school of decorative arts. In view of its eventful history and the variety of institutions that have been active here over the years, the Gropius Bau is organized as an open framework for addressing a broad variety of artistic practices and modes of thinking. Since Stephanie Rosenthal took over as director in 2018, the program has focused on opening up the institution as a location for artistic creation and exchange. The active collaboration with contemporary artists aims at revealing creative processes, presenting new perspectives, and reflecting the possibilities of the institution. A central reference point for the program is also the nuanced examination of the building’s geographical location, history, and present-day status, including questions of land, borders, trauma, care, and repair.

The Living Archive

For the past year, our temporary space 11th Berlin Biennale c/o ExRotaprint has been a site of experiences and exchange. Here multiple stories have been told, shaped, and shared in an array of different languages that continue to be spoken and heard in the courtyard and on the street. This has been a place for experimental exhibition-making, for people to encounter one another, have conversations, drink tea, sit and read to each other, create and stage puppet-plays, draw and write, listen and dance. It has been a setting where the process of making is opened up to the unforeseeable consequences of mutual exposure. We, as incomers, have learned from our neighbors, from their careful curiosity and generous disposition—particularly the children, who were the first to claim a part of these quarters as their own. They knew it belonged to them more than to us, and they used it accordingly. We were sad to shut down when the pandemic hit the city, and rejoiced when it was possible to reopen the doors. We tried to act with care and find safe ways of meeting one another again, convinced of the importance of coming together. This place has been used as a safe house for process, a place where things could be slow, porous, and human scale. For us, it became as close to a home as we could imagine. It is a place made of hospitality, not ours to extend, but that of our surroundings, passersby, participants, guests, artists, and collaborators. People have briefly settled here, gathered, walked through, spoken to one another, and listened. What remains is a living archive of the hospitality gifted by them all.

With works by:

Cansu Çakar, Mirja Reuter and Florian Gass, Kiri Dalena, Mauricio Gatti, Grupo Experimental de Cine (Alfredo Echániz, Gabriel Peluffo, Walter Tournier), Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich/Julia Bonn), Flávio de Carvalho (in collaboration with Raymond Frajmund), Emma Howes and Justin Kennedy in collaboration with Balz Isler, and more

About the venue:

The 11th Berlin Biennale space at ExRotaprint—a tenant-run project initiated by artists, bringing together work, art, and community—has been a space for the 11th Berlin Biennale’s diverse experiences since September 2019. ExRotaprint is a model for urban development that rules out financial profit through ownership and establishes a heterogeneous, open environment for all parts of the community. The former site of the Rotaprint AG printing press manufacturing plant with its buildings dating from the 1950s is located in Berlin’s Wedding neighborhood. In 2004 visual artists Daniela Brahm and Les Schliesser formulated a concept for on-site tenants to take over the property. The goal was to develop the location to serve a heterogeneous mix of uses for “Arbeit, Kunst, Soziales” [work, art, community] and to achieve affordable rent for all. Since 2007, the tenant-founded, non-profit ExRotaprint gGmbH has been dedicated to the restoration and development of the 10,000-square-meter property. Today, ExRotaprint hosts over one hundred social initiatives, businesses, and spaces for independent artists and others working in the creative sector.

The Antichurch

Can patriarchal violence be purged from our collective bodies? The white father, the priest and the statesman, preaching from their nationalist pulpits continue to be celebrated by the masses. Within this barefaced crowd of worshippers bodies press up against one another. The sexual politics of fascism can be felt in a communion of ecstatic repression that lashes out at all heretics. The religion of colonial capitalism, in its many mutations, continues its criminal rampage against a rising majority of non-believers. They, in turn, are defacing the old pale gods and their fundamentalism, vandalizing their cathedrals, proclaiming that their statues will also die. The clergymen warn that this pagan enemy is powerful, invisible, and everywhere, and fortunately they are. Confronting the new theocrats and their followers, their murderous histories, stand those who fight back by simply living their lives. Their very existence is an exercise of survival, manifested in the everyday struggles occurring at this very moment all over the planet: Lullabies sung by elders, insurgencies woven by Indigenous women, children torn from their mothers finding new kinships. Emancipatory cosmologies and sexualities create personal and collective antichurches, queer and transfeminist temples, which confront the tactics of fear and fanaticism spread by the autocrats and their macabre processions. They say, “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn.” They perform rituals of feminist solidarities. They invent matriarchal alliances of rebellious mourning. They share their vulnerability and their stories. They are spiritual healers. And, they are always many, never just one.

With works and contributions by:

Marwa Arsanios; Shuvinai Ashoona; Paula Baeza Pailamilla; Virginia Borges, Gil DuOdé, and Virginia de Medeiros; Cansu Çakar; Edgar Calel (in collaboration with Fernando Pereira dos Santos); Flávio de Carvalho; Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide); Kiri Dalena; Zehra Doğan; El Palomar, Brenda V. Fajardo; Galli; Christine Meisner; Małgorzata Mirga-Tas; Pedro Moraleida Bernardes; Óscar Fernando Morales Martínez; Carlos Motta; Florencia Rodriguez Giles; Mariela Scafati; Young-jun Tak; Teatro da Vertigem; Elena Tejada-Herrera; The Black Mamba – Natasha Mendonca & Suman Sridhar; and Azucena Vieites

About the venue:

Since its inception in the early 1990s, KW Institute for Contemporary Art has devoted itself to the central questions of our times through the production, presentation, and dissemination of contemporary art. The Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, which was launched soon after, emerged from a pressing desire for an extensive dialogue with the international discourse around contemporary art. In addition to other venues across the city the Berlin Biennale has been working with KW’s exhibition space since it’s inauguration. Numerous outstanding artists and internationally renowned curators have since realized important new works and exhibition projects there, establishing the two institutions located under the roof of KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. as vibrant venues for progressive artistic practices, both within the Berlin art scene and internationally.

Storefront for Dissident Bodies

Cities are not made of buildings, but of soft bodies in movement and their cartographies of affect. The clothing we wear helps us make, inhabit, and transform space. Is it possible to wear a place one wants to go to? Is it possible to dress oneself into the collective bodies we desire? Welcome to the storefront for rebel bodies and their choreographies of disarmament. Prêt-à-porter architecture for vulnerable movements and their politics of fashion, tearing down the hypersexualized normalcy of department-store season collections. Clothing as a second skin of protection and care, exposing the masquerades of birth and biological givens. Dress and costume as a caressing flexible fortress, a room of one’s own. Trojan geese and opossums as gentle organic vessels from which to jump out of and dismantle the peddlers of corporate profit and rip apart the uniforms they impose. Outfits and prostheses as acts of love, ways of listening and being with each other and our surroundings. Clothing, coverings and uncoverings, as language and territory. White walls are softened, veiled, made light-reflexive, embracing all in their shimmery drag. This is a storefront for queer and dissident bodies and their fierce promenades.

With works by:

Edgar Calel, Francisco Copello, FCNN – Feminist Collective With No Name (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth/Anita Beikpour), with Neda Sanai, Andrés Fernández, Delaine Le Bas, Dana Michel and Tracy Maurice, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Solvognen (The Sun Chariot) Theater Group, and Osías Yanov and Sirenes Errantes

About the venue:

In 1965, with the help of the former West Berlin Senate, the DAAD [German Academic Exchange Service] took over the “artists-in-residence program” initiated two years earlier by the Ford Foundation. Under the new title “Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD” [DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program], it became a renowned support program for international artists, writers, and musicians, and later also for filmmakers. In 1978, the daadgalerie opened as a new exhibition venue in former West Berlin. The location was intended to bring together the diverse activities of the artists’ program and offer international guests a platform within the West German cultural scene. Since 2017, the daadgalerie has been located at Oranienstraße 161 in Kreuzberg in “Haus Stiller.” The residential and commercial building was designed in 1910 by the Jewish-Hungarian architect Oskar Kaufmann. Interdisciplinary exhibitions and events by current and former guests of the program are shown on two floors. A dialogue with the local art scene and other institutions in the city is the primary focus.

The Inverted Museum

How to grieve the loss of that which was never allowed to exist? All that was erased and silenced in the name of progress, of beauty, of the future? Museums have been built on such multiple deaths. Those pieces of worlds being broken, their looted belongings, continue to be displayed in small glass coffins. Unable to shake off their impulse to possess and incarcerate, museums eased into modernity by reaffirming that all knowledges are indebted to their “discoveries.” Hygienic white walls declared plagues and plantations a thing of the past. Clean slates and grand halls were built to celebrate their great men and their monumental art. Making things new as a way of fixing the past in a perpetual power relation to their present, highjacking temporality itself. But the stones remember the centuries of burning forests, of depleted lands and lives. They have been observing, and they know that time cannot be broken into a straight line. The ancient sounds of the birds, of the rivers and the rocks ripped from the ground roar over us. Those evicted from history do not ask for permission to exist, and they refuse to forget. They warn us that the dark smoke rising from the cracked mother earth poses dangers to all who inhabit her, that the falling sky is an imminent threat. Aware that these walls cannot contain their experiences or those of their murdered elders, they practice listening to heal the wound the world has become. Their stories of disappearance will be heard and felt. They demand neither inclusion nor new ideas but the unequivocal release of all hostages.

With works by:

Pacita Abad, Noor Abuarafeh, Shuvinai Ashoona, Aline Baiana, Deanna Bowen, Flávio de Carvalho, Cian Dayrit, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Francisco Huichaqueo, Käthe Kollwitz, La rara troupe, Mapa Teatro – Laboratorio de Artistas, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA), CL, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, Rio de Janeiro, BR, Museu de Arte Osório Cesar, Franco da Rocha, BR, Andrés Pereira Paz, Antonio Pichillá, Aykan Safoğlu, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Bartolina Xixa, and Katarina Zdjelar

About the venue:

In 1881, the Gropius Bau opened as a museum and school of decorative arts. In view of its eventful history and the variety of institutions that have been active here over the years, the Gropius Bau is organized as an open framework for addressing a broad variety of artistic practices and modes of thinking. Since Stephanie Rosenthal took over as director in 2018, the program has focused on opening up the institution as a location for artistic creation and exchange. The active collaboration with contemporary artists aims at revealing creative processes, presenting new perspectives, and reflecting the possibilities of the institution. A central reference point for the program is also the nuanced examination of the building’s geographical location, history, and present-day status, including questions of land, borders, trauma, care, and repair.

The Living Archive

For the past year, our temporary space 11th Berlin Biennale c/o ExRotaprint has been a site of experiences and exchange. Here multiple stories have been told, shaped, and shared in an array of different languages that continue to be spoken and heard in the courtyard and on the street. This has been a place for experimental exhibition-making, for people to encounter one another, have conversations, drink tea, sit and read to each other, create and stage puppet-plays, draw and write, listen and dance. It has been a setting where the process of making is opened up to the unforeseeable consequences of mutual exposure. We, as incomers, have learned from our neighbors, from their careful curiosity and generous disposition—particularly the children, who were the first to claim a part of these quarters as their own. They knew it belonged to them more than to us, and they used it accordingly. We were sad to shut down when the pandemic hit the city, and rejoiced when it was possible to reopen the doors. We tried to act with care and find safe ways of meeting one another again, convinced of the importance of coming together. This place has been used as a safe house for process, a place where things could be slow, porous, and human scale. For us, it became as close to a home as we could imagine. It is a place made of hospitality, not ours to extend, but that of our surroundings, passersby, participants, guests, artists, and collaborators. People have briefly settled here, gathered, walked through, spoken to one another, and listened. What remains is a living archive of the hospitality gifted by them all.

With works by:

Cansu Çakar, Mirja Reuter and Florian Gass, Kiri Dalena, Mauricio Gatti, Grupo Experimental de Cine (Alfredo Echániz, Gabriel Peluffo, Walter Tournier), Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich/Julia Bonn), Flávio de Carvalho (in collaboration with Raymond Frajmund), Emma Howes and Justin Kennedy in collaboration with Balz Isler, and more

About the venue:

The 11th Berlin Biennale space at ExRotaprint—a tenant-run project initiated by artists, bringing together work, art, and community—has been a space for the 11th Berlin Biennale’s diverse experiences since September 2019. ExRotaprint is a model for urban development that rules out financial profit through ownership and establishes a heterogeneous, open environment for all parts of the community. The former site of the Rotaprint AG printing press manufacturing plant with its buildings dating from the 1950s is located in Berlin’s Wedding neighborhood. In 2004 visual artists Daniela Brahm and Les Schliesser formulated a concept for on-site tenants to take over the property. The goal was to develop the location to serve a heterogeneous mix of uses for “Arbeit, Kunst, Soziales” [work, art, community] and to achieve affordable rent for all. Since 2007, the tenant-founded, non-profit ExRotaprint gGmbH has been dedicated to the restoration and development of the 10,000-square-meter property. Today, ExRotaprint hosts over one hundred social initiatives, businesses, and spaces for independent artists and others working in the creative sector.

The Antichurch

Can patriarchal violence be purged from our collective bodies? The white father, the priest and the statesman, preaching from their nationalist pulpits continue to be celebrated by the masses. Within this barefaced crowd of worshippers bodies press up against one another. The sexual politics of fascism can be felt in a communion of ecstatic repression that lashes out at all heretics. The religion of colonial capitalism, in its many mutations, continues its criminal rampage against a rising majority of non-believers. They, in turn, are defacing the old pale gods and their fundamentalism, vandalizing their cathedrals, proclaiming that their statues will also die. The clergymen warn that this pagan enemy is powerful, invisible, and everywhere, and fortunately they are. Confronting the new theocrats and their followers, their murderous histories, stand those who fight back by simply living their lives. Their very existence is an exercise of survival, manifested in the everyday struggles occurring at this very moment all over the planet: Lullabies sung by elders, insurgencies woven by Indigenous women, children torn from their mothers finding new kinships. Emancipatory cosmologies and sexualities create personal and collective antichurches, queer and transfeminist temples, which confront the tactics of fear and fanaticism spread by the autocrats and their macabre processions. They say, “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn.” They perform rituals of feminist solidarities. They invent matriarchal alliances of rebellious mourning. They share their vulnerability and their stories. They are spiritual healers. And, they are always many, never just one.

With works and contributions by:

Marwa Arsanios; Shuvinai Ashoona; Paula Baeza Pailamilla; Virginia Borges, Gil DuOdé, and Virginia de Medeiros; Cansu Çakar; Edgar Calel (in collaboration with Fernando Pereira dos Santos); Flávio de Carvalho; Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide); Kiri Dalena; Zehra Doğan; El Palomar, Brenda V. Fajardo; Galli; Christine Meisner; Małgorzata Mirga-Tas; Pedro Moraleida Bernardes; Óscar Fernando Morales Martínez; Carlos Motta; Florencia Rodriguez Giles; Mariela Scafati; Young-jun Tak; Teatro da Vertigem; Elena Tejada-Herrera; The Black Mamba – Natasha Mendonca & Suman Sridhar; and Azucena Vieites

About the venue:

Since its inception in the early 1990s, KW Institute for Contemporary Art has devoted itself to the central questions of our times through the production, presentation, and dissemination of contemporary art. The Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, which was launched soon after, emerged from a pressing desire for an extensive dialogue with the international discourse around contemporary art. In addition to other venues across the city the Berlin Biennale has been working with KW’s exhibition space since it’s inauguration. Numerous outstanding artists and internationally renowned curators have since realized important new works and exhibition projects there, establishing the two institutions located under the roof of KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. as vibrant venues for progressive artistic practices, both within the Berlin art scene and internationally.

Storefront for Dissident Bodies

Cities are not made of buildings, but of soft bodies in movement and their cartographies of affect. The clothing we wear helps us make, inhabit, and transform space. Is it possible to wear a place one wants to go to? Is it possible to dress oneself into the collective bodies we desire? Welcome to the storefront for rebel bodies and their choreographies of disarmament. Prêt-à-porter architecture for vulnerable movements and their politics of fashion, tearing down the hypersexualized normalcy of department-store season collections. Clothing as a second skin of protection and care, exposing the masquerades of birth and biological givens. Dress and costume as a caressing flexible fortress, a room of one’s own. Trojan geese and opossums as gentle organic vessels from which to jump out of and dismantle the peddlers of corporate profit and rip apart the uniforms they impose. Outfits and prostheses as acts of love, ways of listening and being with each other and our surroundings. Clothing, coverings and uncoverings, as language and territory. White walls are softened, veiled, made light-reflexive, embracing all in their shimmery drag. This is a storefront for queer and dissident bodies and their fierce promenades.

With works by:

Edgar Calel, Francisco Copello, FCNN – Feminist Collective With No Name (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth/Anita Beikpour), with Neda Sanai, Andrés Fernández, Delaine Le Bas, Dana Michel and Tracy Maurice, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Solvognen (The Sun Chariot) Theater Group, and Osías Yanov and Sirenes Errantes

About the venue:

In 1965, with the help of the former West Berlin Senate, the DAAD [German Academic Exchange Service] took over the “artists-in-residence program” initiated two years earlier by the Ford Foundation. Under the new title “Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD” [DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program], it became a renowned support program for international artists, writers, and musicians, and later also for filmmakers. In 1978, the daadgalerie opened as a new exhibition venue in former West Berlin. The location was intended to bring together the diverse activities of the artists’ program and offer international guests a platform within the West German cultural scene. Since 2017, the daadgalerie has been located at Oranienstraße 161 in Kreuzberg in “Haus Stiller.” The residential and commercial building was designed in 1910 by the Jewish-Hungarian architect Oskar Kaufmann. Interdisciplinary exhibitions and events by current and former guests of the program are shown on two floors. A dialogue with the local art scene and other institutions in the city is the primary focus.

The Inverted Museum

How to grieve the loss of that which was never allowed to exist? All that was erased and silenced in the name of progress, of beauty, of the future? Museums have been built on such multiple deaths. Those pieces of worlds being broken, their looted belongings, continue to be displayed in small glass coffins. Unable to shake off their impulse to possess and incarcerate, museums eased into modernity by reaffirming that all knowledges are indebted to their “discoveries.” Hygienic white walls declared plagues and plantations a thing of the past. Clean slates and grand halls were built to celebrate their great men and their monumental art. Making things new as a way of fixing the past in a perpetual power relation to their present, highjacking temporality itself. But the stones remember the centuries of burning forests, of depleted lands and lives. They have been observing, and they know that time cannot be broken into a straight line. The ancient sounds of the birds, of the rivers and the rocks ripped from the ground roar over us. Those evicted from history do not ask for permission to exist, and they refuse to forget. They warn us that the dark smoke rising from the cracked mother earth poses dangers to all who inhabit her, that the falling sky is an imminent threat. Aware that these walls cannot contain their experiences or those of their murdered elders, they practice listening to heal the wound the world has become. Their stories of disappearance will be heard and felt. They demand neither inclusion nor new ideas but the unequivocal release of all hostages.

With works by:

Pacita Abad, Noor Abuarafeh, Shuvinai Ashoona, Aline Baiana, Deanna Bowen, Flávio de Carvalho, Cian Dayrit, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Francisco Huichaqueo, Käthe Kollwitz, La rara troupe, Mapa Teatro – Laboratorio de Artistas, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA), CL, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, Rio de Janeiro, BR, Museu de Arte Osório Cesar, Franco da Rocha, BR, Andrés Pereira Paz, Antonio Pichillá, Aykan Safoğlu, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Bartolina Xixa, and Katarina Zdjelar

About the venue:

In 1881, the Gropius Bau opened as a museum and school of decorative arts. In view of its eventful history and the variety of institutions that have been active here over the years, the Gropius Bau is organized as an open framework for addressing a broad variety of artistic practices and modes of thinking. Since Stephanie Rosenthal took over as director in 2018, the program has focused on opening up the institution as a location for artistic creation and exchange. The active collaboration with contemporary artists aims at revealing creative processes, presenting new perspectives, and reflecting the possibilities of the institution. A central reference point for the program is also the nuanced examination of the building’s geographical location, history, and present-day status, including questions of land, borders, trauma, care, and repair.

The Living Archive

For the past year, our temporary space 11th Berlin Biennale c/o ExRotaprint has been a site of experiences and exchange. Here multiple stories have been told, shaped, and shared in an array of different languages that continue to be spoken and heard in the courtyard and on the street. This has been a place for experimental exhibition-making, for people to encounter one another, have conversations, drink tea, sit and read to each other, create and stage puppet-plays, draw and write, listen and dance. It has been a setting where the process of making is opened up to the unforeseeable consequences of mutual exposure. We, as incomers, have learned from our neighbors, from their careful curiosity and generous disposition—particularly the children, who were the first to claim a part of these quarters as their own. They knew it belonged to them more than to us, and they used it accordingly. We were sad to shut down when the pandemic hit the city, and rejoiced when it was possible to reopen the doors. We tried to act with care and find safe ways of meeting one another again, convinced of the importance of coming together. This place has been used as a safe house for process, a place where things could be slow, porous, and human scale. For us, it became as close to a home as we could imagine. It is a place made of hospitality, not ours to extend, but that of our surroundings, passersby, participants, guests, artists, and collaborators. People have briefly settled here, gathered, walked through, spoken to one another, and listened. What remains is a living archive of the hospitality gifted by them all.

With works by:

Cansu Çakar, Mirja Reuter and Florian Gass, Kiri Dalena, Mauricio Gatti, Grupo Experimental de Cine (Alfredo Echániz, Gabriel Peluffo, Walter Tournier), Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich/Julia Bonn), Flávio de Carvalho (in collaboration with Raymond Frajmund), Emma Howes and Justin Kennedy in collaboration with Balz Isler, and more

About the venue:

The 11th Berlin Biennale space at ExRotaprint—a tenant-run project initiated by artists, bringing together work, art, and community—has been a space for the 11th Berlin Biennale’s diverse experiences since September 2019. ExRotaprint is a model for urban development that rules out financial profit through ownership and establishes a heterogeneous, open environment for all parts of the community. The former site of the Rotaprint AG printing press manufacturing plant with its buildings dating from the 1950s is located in Berlin’s Wedding neighborhood. In 2004 visual artists Daniela Brahm and Les Schliesser formulated a concept for on-site tenants to take over the property. The goal was to develop the location to serve a heterogeneous mix of uses for “Arbeit, Kunst, Soziales” [work, art, community] and to achieve affordable rent for all. Since 2007, the tenant-founded, non-profit ExRotaprint gGmbH has been dedicated to the restoration and development of the 10,000-square-meter property. Today, ExRotaprint hosts over one hundred social initiatives, businesses, and spaces for independent artists and others working in the creative sector.