THE SPACE //

presents

T H E A R T O F B O R D E R

S A B O T A G E

- E C H O E S F R O M T H E

E D G E S

works and creative productions by

AL ANDERS QUINN GAPP

MARIAM IBRAHIM FREHIWET NEGASI

Exhibition Concept, Idea, Curation:

Al Anders, Quinn Gapp, Mariam Ibrahim

Artistic Direction THE SPACE //:

Sarice Brudet

05.06. – 04.07.2026

„THE ART OF BORDER SABOTAGE – ECHOES FROM THE EDGES“ brings together the work and creative production of four international contemporary artists who explore and engage with border regimes,migration, social indifference, memory and forms of belonging.

The exhibition takes as a starting point the contemporary intensification of securitization policies across Europe and beyond: the militarization of borders, the expansion of surveillance infrastructures, normalisation of deportation regimes, and the mobilization of fear as political currency which influnce and reshape democratic societies. This staging of threat scenarios contributes to the erosion of fundamental rights while simultaneously fueling authoritarian nationalism, exclusionary politics, andexpanding regimes of surveillance and deportation. The exhibition situates itself within ongoing debates surrounding migration, postcoloniality, surveillance, and biopolitics. Yet rather than merely documenting suffering as spectacle, the exhibition turns toward the structures that make violence simultaneously hypervisible and invisible. The participating artists explore how these structures continue to regulate movement, visibility, labor, and belonging while simultaneously producing categories such as citizen, foreigner, refugee, and undocumented body. It asks how borders are produced, naturalized, aestheticized, and emotionally absorbed - and how art might interrupt these processes.

“The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of eqaulity before law and freedom of opinion – formulas which were designed to solve problems within national communities - but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.”

Hannah Arendt

For most of human history, borders as we understand them today did not exist in their current rigid form. Human movement preceded the nation-state by millennia. Migration is not the exception in human history, but one of its foundational conditions. People moved across landscapes through seasonal migration, trade, survival, nomadic cultures, exile, pilgrimage, labor and ecological change long before the modern border emerged as an instrument of territorial control. Mobility is not an interruption of civilization; it is one of its founding logics.

The contemporary border regime, however, depends upon a different narrative. It frames movement as anomaly, emergency, invasion, administrative burden, demographic threat. In doing so, it obscures amore difficult truth: borders, as we know them today, are historical constructions. The contemporary border is largely a modern political invention, intensifying alongside colonial expansion, cartography, industrialization, and the rise of the nation-state between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The drawing of borders was often deeply entangled with imperial violence: territories divided through colonial treaties, extraction economies, and geopolitical negotiations imposed onto landscapes and communities. It created systems of classification, and political imaginaries of belonging. Many contemporary conflicts and migration routes continue to carry the afterlives of these imposed cartographies. Borders, therefore, are not neutral geographical facts. They are political fictions rendered material. They classify bodies into citizen and foreigner, legal and illegal, visible and disposable.

THE ART OF BORDER SABOTAGE – ECHOES FROM THE EDGES approaches borders not merely as geopolitical demarcations and territorial lines, but as psychological, social, cultural, technological, and aesthetic regimes that shape visibility, movement, belonging, and exclusion. A line inscribed onto landscapes and bodies, but also onto language, memory, biographies and perception itself. Borders in this context are also made of images, narratives, and emotions.

As the scientist and historian Benedict Anderson argued, nations are “imagined communities” - political constructs sustained through narratives, symbols, institutions, and collective fictions of belonging. Borders, therefore, are not neutral geographical facts. They are technologies of imagination and administration.

The border has become anticipatory governance. One is screened before traveling, categorized before speaking, assessed before arrival. The image plays a decisive role within this transformation. Predictive technologies, biometric databases, algorithmic sorting, satellite surveillance, visa analytics, risk profiling and outsourced detention contracts. Invisible agreements negotiated far from public scrutiny. Contemporary image production cannot be separated from the political economies of surveillance, circulation and digital control. Images today do not merely represent borders - they increasingly participate in producing them. Drone imagery, biometric facial scans, algorithmic visibility and media narratives generate what may be understood as visual sovereignties: systems through which bodies are rendered readable, suspicious, humanitarian, threatening, admissible or disposable. The border has become mobile precisely because sovereignty itself has become infrastructural. The exhibition approaches the border not as a fixed marker of sovereignty, but as a shifting technology of power that continuously produces categories of belonging and otherness.

The Mediterranean, once imagined as a space of exchange, circulation, and intertwined civilizations, has increasingly been transformed into a militarized frontier. Europe’s externalization policies, detention infrastructures, and outsourced deportation mechanisms demonstrate that the border today no longer exists only at the territorial edge. It travels inward and outward simultaneously.

Contemporary border regimes increasingly operate through the logic of deterrence. The spectacle of the fence, the camp, the deportation charter, or the militarized patrol often functions as much symbolically as operationally - communicating political resolve through calculated performances of exclusion. In this sense, borders participate in strategic economies of fear, signaling, and behavioral management.

The border thus functions not only as territorial apparatus but as epistemological machine. It determines whose movement becomes visible, whose suffering becomes legible, whose testimony becomes credible, whose disappearance remains administratively unremarkable. This epistemic dimension becomes inseparable from the politics of externalization shaping contemporary Europe.

Responsibility fragments across institutions, subcontractors, bureaucratic layers and geopolitical intermediaries. It is precisely this fragmentation that the exhibition seeks to expose. Not by reproducing simplistic binaries of victim and perpetrator, but by tracing the diffuse architectures through whichbordering permeates everyday political life.

The exhibition THE ART OF BORDER SABOTAGE – ECHOES FROM THE EDGES asks how art might interrupt, destabilize, and reimagine the architectures of separation that shape contemporary life.

Through film, installation, photography, sound and performative practices the exhibition investigates how borders continue to produce categories of inside and outside, citizen and foreigner, visible and invisible, human and disposable. Complementing the exhibition are moderated talks, discussion formats, andparticipatory formats like workshops and interactive events that open the exhibition space as a site of exchange and collective reflection.

Art in this context becomes a practice capable of exposing hidden structures while simultaneously opening spaces for other forms of relation and coexistence to emerge.

At the same time, THE ART OF BORDER SABOTAGE – ECHOES FROM THE EDGES, refuses the closure implied by the border itself. The notion of “sabotage” is understood here not as destruction alone, but as an artistic methodology of interruption: a disruption of dominant narratives, inherited categories, normalized forms of indifference and systems of control. In the curatorial framing, the term sabotage shifts away from pure destruction toward a form of critical imagination and resistance. Art becomes a space through which borders may be questioned, destabilized, and reimagined. It’s objective is exposing, or undermining the systems, narratives, and power structures that borders produce. The phrase Border Sabotage suggests challenging ideas of exclusion, nationalism, and separation as well as disrupting fear-based narratives around migration and identity. Revealing how borders operate psychologically, socially, economically, and emotionally. Sabotage, in this sense, becomes a poetic and political act: a refusal to comply with imposed structures of separation, a disruption of normalized violence and a reprogramming of perception.

The subtitle, Echoes from the Edges, suggests that what is pushed to the margins never fully disappears. Echoes travel across walls, generations, archives, languages, waters, ruins and history. They return through gestures, images, frequencies, and memories. They exceed containment. The edge becomes a resonant zone where suppressed histories continue to speak. The edge becomes not only a site of exclusion, but also one of relation, encounter, resistance, translation, cultural transformation and emerging forms of coexistence. The “edge” becomes a threshold: a place where fixed identities begin to dissolve, where histories overlap, and where new forms of solidarity may emerge.

The author, philosopher and activist Gloria Anzaldúa describes in her seminal book Borderlands / La Frontera, the border not simply as a geopolitical boundary, but as a psychic and existential condition. For Anzaldúa, the borderland is a space of hybridity, contradiction, vulnerability, transformation and becoming - a place where identities remain in constant negotiation. Borders produce violence, but they also generate languages of survival, hybridity and resistant relationality. Her notion of the mestiza consciousness refuses singular narratives and instead inhabit states of multiplicity and in-betweenness. The borderland wounds generate unstable forms of knowledge capable of resisting binary frameworks of identity and belonging. The “edges” become spaces of knowledge, survival, hybridity, interrupted histories, fragmented archives, and trembling forms of relation.

The exhibition also enters into dialogue with Michel Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary power as diffuse, spatialized, and embedded within institutional structures and his analysis of biopolitics: the management of life through systems that classify, regulate, and optimize populations. Yet what is at stake today exceeds discipline - it is a computational governance of bodies, where data flows decide mobility, value, and disposability. Borders function not only through walls or checkpoints, but through systems of surveillance, categorization, and discipline that regulate movement and visibility. In this sense, the border becomes not simply a wall but an apparatus - one that shapes how bodies are read, classified, and controlled. A network of laws, architectures, classifications, media representations, and disciplinary mechanisms governing mobility and belonging.

In this context Achille Mbembe’s philosophical and political concept of necropolitics is also of importance. The Cameroonian philosopher developed this concpt especially in his influential essay “Necropolitics” (2003). Achille Mbembe describes as necropolitics - regimes determining who may move, who may remain suspended in legal precarity, and whose exposure to violence becomes administratively tolerable. It refers to how political systems, states, borders, militaries, economies, and institutions govern through exposure to death, disposability, abandonment, or unequal vulnerability - conditions in which some people are systematically exposed to injury, abandonment, precarity, or death. In border discourse the question arises:

How do borders not only regulate movement but expose certain bodies to deserts, seas, camps, detention, waiting, invisibility, or death?

Borders become spaces where mobility, vulnerability and humanity are unevenly distributed. Certain lives are rendered legible, protected and grievable; others become administratively invisible. The border and sea itself become political archives. A passageway for tourism, commerce and privilege for some. A zone of interception, disappearance and precarious survival for others.

If borders produce regimes of visibility, they also produce regimes of belonging. Few thinkers have articulated this condition more powerfully than Hannah Arendt. Writing in the aftermath of fascism, forced displacement and mass statelessness, Arendt identified a foundational contradiction within modern political systems: rights are frequently imagined as universal while remaining structurally dependent upon national recognition. The stateless person reveals this fracture with devastating clarity. To lose citizenship is not merely to lose paperwork. It is to risk losing what Arendt called “the right to have rights.” Hannah Arendt described the condition of statelessness as one of the defining political crises of modernity. Statelessness is not merely the absence of citizenship; it exposes the fragility of political belonging itself. When rights become contingent upon national recognition, humanity becomes bureaucratically conditional. Contemporary border regimes continue to reproduce this paradox. Legal status determines access to mobility, labor, shelter, healthcare, representation and protection, while entire populations are suspended within administrative grey zones of waiting, conditional legality and bureaucratic uncertainty. Statelessness becomes not an exceptional condition but a governing logic dispersed across detention infrastructures, temporary permits, asylum backlogs and undocumented life. Yet life persists within these spaces.

The exhibition further resonates with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of “the undercommons”: fugitive spaces that exist beneath and beyond dominant institutional structures. Here, the edge becomes not a zone of exclusion alone, but also a site where informal solidarities, resistant forms of knowledge, and alternative social imaginaries can emerge. Border sabotage, in this sense, is also the creation of clandestine forms of care and togetherness.

This aligns with the writings of Jacques Rancière, who argued that politics and aesthetics are deeply intertwined through what he calls the “distribution of the sensible” - the systems determining what can be seen, heard, and recognized within society. The artists gathered here intervene precisely within these regimes of perception. Through these interventions, the exhibition asks whether art can produce spaces in which alternative social imaginaries and forms of coexistence become thinkable.

Frantz Fanon also helps shift the discussion from borders as territorial administration toward borders as psychic and embodied colonial infrastructures. In The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon demonstrates how colonial systems do not simply occupy land; they reorganize space, subjectivity, and perception itself. Colonialism partitions the world into zones - human and subhuman, visible and invisible, privilege and abandonment, mobility and enclosure, humanity and disposability protected and expendable. Contemporary borders inherit this architecture. They continue to distribute precocity, labor, and political recognition unevenly across bodies and geographies. Fanon understood trauma not only as individual psychology but as historically produced violence embedded in colonial and wartime realities.

Borders are not only cultural or ideological structures; they are also economic machines. Migration is deeply tied to global labor inequalities, resource distribution, colonial extraction histories, demographic pressures, climate economics, capital mobility versus restricted human mobility.

Modern borders do not merely defend territory; they regulate labor, value, and access. While capital, commodities, and digital information circulate with increasing speed, human mobility remains intensely controlled. Borders thus function not only as security infrastructures but as economic technologies governing differential access to work, protection, welfare, and survival.

Contemporary migration therefor cannot be understood outside the economic architectures that produce displacement itself. As Saskia Sassen argues, global systems increasingly generate forms of expulsion - through extraction, debt, war economies, environmental devastation, and uneven development. The border thus emerges not at the beginning of migration, but at the end of a much longer chain of geopolitical and economic processes.

The works in the exhibtion are not presented as isolated positions but enter into dynamic relation with one another, reflecting the simultaneity of regressive and progressive forces, collapse and possibility, violence and solidarity - often existing in unsettling proximity. They propose forms of attention that resist indifference and dehumanization. This question of belonging - and of who is permitted to belong - runs throughout the exhibition. Visitors are invited not only to observe but to reflect upon their own entanglements within these systems through acts of critical imagination and relational thinking.

AL ANDERS presents the multimedia installation Uncontained: Breaking the Apparatus. The artist accompanies Iranian actor Mohadeseh Salehinasab to sites along her migration route, transforming experiences of displacement and trauma into acts of agency and self-determination.

„My existence is political. Every day that I rise, I resist their desire to destroy me."

Mohadeseh Salehinasab

This statement by Iranian actress Mohadeseh Salehinasab marked the beginning of a shared journey of the artist Al Anders and the actress – and the beginning of the installation Uncontained: Breaking the Apparatus. Geography becomes layered with memory; bureaucracy collides with embodiment; displacement is transformed from a narrative of victimhood into an act of confrontation and self-determination. In this context border violence is understood as collective trauma. The work does not simply represent migration - it exposes the infrastructures through which movement is governed and lived - and how economic logics intersect with systems of control. The title itself - Breaking the Apparatus - evokes both structures and the possibility of interruption: an attempt to expose and sabotage the mechanisms that organize movement, surveillance, and exclusion. An endeavor to analyze and decontruct an order in which the imprisonment, surveillance and division of bodies into productive and disposable is normalized.

The documentary material of the film merges with animations distributed throughout the space, tracing a cartography of European asylum politics – an apparatus of violence consisting of NATO wire, prisons, Closed Controlled Access Centers, cameras, data collections, border guards, Frontex and coast guards. The 3D scans projected into the space represent the sediments of border violence in the unconscious, which settle not only within individuals but also between people. The viewer walks through them and becomes part of the space of experience.

In this is context the notion of vagrancy as resistance is of importance. Writer, activist and teacher Silvia Federici shows in Caliban and the Witch that vagrancy is historically not merely a symptom of poverty or displacement, but a collective political practice – a principle of resistance that disrupts capitalist productive discipline and therefore must be criminalized.

The psychiatrist François Tosquelles – who fled the Spanish Civil War and worked in refugee camps – takes this further: for him, the freedom to vagabond is not only a political demand, but the core of therapeutic knowledge. Only in movement, in the wandering through spaces and borders, do encounter, knowledge and healing emerge. Without this freedom, he insists, one cannot speak of human rights – the first human right is the right to wander the earth.

Resistance lies neither solely in the breaking of steel nor in the hacking of algorithms – but also in the rising again, in the moving on, in the sustaining of a movement that refuses fixation. Sabotage can be poetic, material, collective, queer. The right to move – unconfined, uncontrolled, across every border – is vehemently defended.

The exhibition includes photographic works of the series Asmara 1975 by the Eritrean-born artist FREHIWET NEGASI whose childhood was profoundly shaped by war, displacement, and forced migration under the Ethiopian occupation of Eritrea. Developed through an adult return to the place of origin left behind in childhood, the works explore memory, trauma, borders and Heimat through fragmented visual narratives that resist linear documentary form. Her photographic practice unfolds through flashbacks, sensory traces and incomplete images. Memory appears not as stable archive but as scattered atmosphere. The camera functions simultaneously as tool and protective device - confronting inner fear-images and inherited memories with lived encounters in the present. Large-scale photographs translate the overwhelming perspective of childhood experience into physical presence, rendering visible both the weight of traumatic memory and the ongoing work of transformation. In Frehiwet Negasi-Wache’s practice, photography becomes an act of re-encounter - not the stabilization of truth, but the slow renegotiation of one’s relation to fear, history, and place.

Through documentary video and installation-based works, QUINN GAPP’s The Gaze of Indifference depicts the lived realities of migrants and refugees in Germany. The work is structured into three interconnected bodies of work: White Noise, Brown Voice, and Black Body - a multimedia spatial ensemble of video works, photographic series, 3D installations, and interactive situations. The work examines forms of societal desensitization toward violence, exclusion, migratory realities, political dehumanization, and structural racism. In a condition of media overstimulation, we move between permanent visibility and emotional numbness. How is empathy still possible? A central motif connecting all the works is the eye - not as a neutral organ of sight, but as a politically conditioned instance situated between surveillance, consumption, and repression. The gaze appears simultaneously overwhelmed and Immunized: capable of seeing, yet increasingly incapable of responding.

Quinn Gapp shifts attention toward another scale of bordering: the intimate geographies of proximity, neighborhood formation and social indifference. Borders do not only divide states; they organize urban coexistence, shape informal territories of belonging and determine who may remain visible, welcomed, surveilled or ignored within shared civic space. Through such work, bordering emerges as an everyday social choreography embedded within housing structures, communal habits, inherited fears and fragile forms of solidarity. This movement between geopolitical systems and lived textures is central to the exhibition’s curatorial proposition. Through Quinn Gapp’s attention to neighborhood dynamics and social proximity, the exhibition foregrounds the micro-politics of everyday coexistence. The border appears not only at national frontiers but within urban arrangements, communal anxieties, informal solidarities and the subtle geographies of who belongs where.

Here, the exhibition enters into dialogue with Susan Sontag’s reflections on mediated suffering. As Sontag noted:

“No one after a while can take it all in. The eye glazes over. The mind shuts off.”

Susan Sontag reflects on the politics and ethics of images, particularly the representation of violence, war, and human suffering which carry a paradox: they can awaken ethical attention, but through repetition they may also cultivate numbness, spectatorship and compassion fatigue. In Regarding the Pain of Others, her thinking invites a critical examination of how suffering is made visible, consumed, or rendered distant through visual culture - a perspective highly relevant to contemporary border regimes, media narratives, and the aesthetics of witnessing. In contemporary digital culture, crisis itself risks becoming a consumable visual genre.

Where do emotions go when suffering becomes normalized spectacle? The search leads toward what might be described as „shadow societies“ - populations rendered structurally invisible within camps, detention centers, prisons, psychiatric institutions, informal labor economies, and administrative margins. These are spaces that contemporary societies simultaneously produce and refuse to see yet simultaneously sustained by informal solidarities, underground networks and economies, neighborhood alliances, diasporic memory and everyday acts of care. These fragile forms of hospitality generate alternative infrastructures of belonging that frequently remain invisible within official political narratives.

Here, the work of Paul Gilroy offers an important counterpoint. Gilroy’s thinking around diaspora and planetary humanism refuses rigid notions of purified national identity. Instead, identity emerges through movement, encounter, entanglement and historical relation. Migration does not threaten culture from the outside; it reveals that cultures themselves are already constituted through crossings, translations and unresolved inheritances.

MARIAM IBRAHIM’s participatory spatial installation Soft Territories redirects the gaze toward alternative concepts of citizenship, belonging, solidarity and political participation. A solution does not lie solely in critique, but in practice: in reimagining cities as spaces of sanctuary rather than exclusion, in designing infrastructures of care instead of control, in shifting from economies of fear to ecologies of relation. To sabotage a border, then, is not only to dismantle a wall. It is to unlearn the habits that sustain it. Urban practices of solidarity scrutinize and reimagine administrative processes, opening alternative spaces of care, participation, and belonging beyond institutional frameworks.

The work proposes that solidarity is not abstract ethics but lived infrastructure. Drawing inspiration from abolitionist democratic thought, community-based practices, and sanctuary imaginaries such as Quilombos, Rojava, and Sanctuary City initiatives, Soft Territories asks what forms of coexistence become possible when inclusion is understood not as normative assimilation but as collective negotiation. The work’s speculative gestures toward alternative documentation systems, and participatory forms of citizenship do not merely imagine utopia; they reveal that other political grammars already exist within the cracks of dominant systems. Here, sanctuary emerges not merely as legal protection but as cultural and ethical imagination. The question becomes how coexistence might be practiced under conditions of radical asymmetry. Sanctuary here exceeds legal designation. It emerges as political imagination, ethical relation and collective experiment. Coexistence in this context is not a completed political achievement but an ongoing practice of negotiation across asymmetrical histories, unequal mobilities and unfinished wounds.

In „Shelter Codes“, Ibrahim maps real-world examples of supportive migration infrastructures in cities such as San Francisco, Amsterdam, and regions of Spain. Using embroidered textile maps derived from urban data. She transforms buildings and institutions into visual codes that reveal otherwise invisible dynamics of surveillance, exclusion, protection, and solidarity. The work demonstrates that more humane migration policies already exist and can serve as models for broader social transformation.

The accompanying „Decode Key“ explains how architectural forms function as a coded language. Building shapes, densities, and patterns represent different political forces and relationships, turning the city into a readable landscape of both care and control.

In „Transit Terminal (Soft Territories I)“, Ibrahim translates these ideas into a spatial experience. Resembling a checkpoint or administrative booth, the installation removes the mechanisms of control usually associated with such spaces. Instead, it imagines an infrastructure of arrival based on presence, dignity, and care rather than documentation and surveillance. The work poses an open question: What might a softer, more humane architecture of belonging look like?

Together, the works function as both critique and proposition - revealing existing structures of border violence while imagining practical alternatives grounded in solidarity, participation, and collective responsibility.

The exhibition THE ART OF BORDER SABOTAGE – ECHOES FROM THE EDGES holds several layers simultaneously: political urgency, poetic ambiguity, spatial imagination, emotional resonance, institutional critique and artistic agency. It reminds us that movement has always been central to human existence - and that the line dividing “inside” from “outside” is neither eternal nor neutral, but historically constructed and continuously contested.

Ultimately, THE ART OF BORDER SABOTAGE – ECHOES FROM THE EDGES asks whether art can create temporary breaches within systems that appear immovable. Not by offering simplistic solutions, but by unsettling certainties, exposing contradictions, and making space for forms of encounter that the border seeks to prevent. The exhibition insists that the edge is not the end of the world, but the place from which another world may begin to be imagined.

The exhibition proposes sabotage as a poetic and aesthetic gesture: an interruption of dominant narratives and fixed identities - a space in which suppressed histories, fragmented voices, and unstable forms of belonging continue to reverberate across walls, waters, languages, and generations. Art becomes a space where the architectures of separation may be unsettled, however temporarily, allowing other forms of coexistence to appear and be imagined.

Text: Sarice Brudet

Sources:

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition.

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks

Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth

Silvia Federici: Caliban and the Witch

Michel Foucault’s: The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979

Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation

Édouard Glissant: Kultur & Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt

Édouard Glissant: Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite

Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

Fred Moten: In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition.

Jacques Rancière: Politics and Aesthetics

Hartmut Rosa: Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World

Saskia Sassen: Transnational economies and national migration policies

Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others

Charles Taylor: Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition

THE SPACE //

presents

O P A C I T Y A N D L I G H T

works and creative productions by

GEORGES ADÉAGBO TAQWA ALI RAHEL BRUNS SARICE BRUDET INAH CHOE LORENZ EGLE STEFFEN JOPP ANDREY KLASSEN ELISA MANIG MORITZ NEUHOFF SOFIA SEIDI ROBIN RHODE NICK WACHS MEGGIE WEINHEIMER

15.04. -27.05.2026

The exhibition „OPACITY AND LIGHT“ brings together the work and creative productions of 14 international contemporary artists who explore the dynamic interplay between Opacity and Light - between what reveals itself and what remains partially concealed. Through painting, sculpture, installation, and spatial interventions, the exhibition approaches both light and opacity as aesthetic materials and as philosophical conditions shaping perception, relation and coexistence.

„ THE RIGHT TO OPACITY WOULD BE THE REAL FOUNDATION OF RELATION, IN FREEDOMS“

- Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990)

The exhibition builds on the concept of opacity articulated by poet, novelist, and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) – the right not to be fully understood - and places it in dialogue with light as a metaphor for revelation, knowledge and clarity – yet also for exposure, classification and control.

Glissant’s poetics of opacity proposes an onto-epistemological resistance to rendering the other transparent. At its core lies the dynamic between what becomes visible and what remains irreducibly opaque. In his Poetics of Relation (1990), opacity resists reduction and total comprehension; it refuses the impulse to make individuals, cultures, or histories fully legible. The „Right to Opacity” thus becomes an ethical and political stance against the violence of reducing others to a known, categorized truth, which is often a tool of domination. Relation, for Glissant, is grounded not in transparency, but in respect for irreducible complexity.

Opacity preserves singularity, difference, and the layered nature of lived experience. Opacity is not darkness - it is depth. It is an accumulation of histories, bodies, languages, cultural crossings, and memories that cannot be translated into a single dominant light. It is the recognition that every being, every history carries layers that cannot - and need not - be fully disclosed. In this sense, opacity also preserves mystery and magic – understood not as superstition but as the living depth of the world. It arises where something exceeds comprehension yet remains present.

Opacity, in this context, is not understood as a lack of clarity but as an autonomous mode of knowing. It challenges the Western assumption that universal understanding is either desirable or possible, proposing instead a "world mentality" that embraces diverse, untranslatable perspectives.

This exhibition unfolds in dialogue with Europe’s Enlightenment - the Siècle des Lumières, the Age of Reason - a period that positioned light as the central metaphor of progress, emancipation and rational knowledge. Across eighteenth century Europe, a vision emerged of humanity stepping out of the shadow into rational clarity. Yet Illumination also interrogates, surveils, and extracts. It exposes, classifies, and renders visibility in ways that can flatten difference. Every act of revelation produces shadow.

This exhibition considers the threshold between these two gestures: When does light liberate? When does it erase and flatten complexity? When does clarity become overexposure? What kind of light do we need today - a light that dominates, or a light that listens?

Immanuel Kant defined Enlightenment as humanity’s emergence from self-imposed immaturity through the courage to use reason. Yet this exhibition asks: whose reason, whose light, and at what cost? Hannah Arendt warned that excessive illumination can destroy the fragile space of appearance where plurality thrives. To exist together requires not total exposure but relational space - intervals of shadow where difference can breathe.

Thinkers such as Voltaire championed reason against superstition. Denis Diderot and the Encyclopédie sought to catalogue and illuminate all branches of knowledge. David Hume examined the foundations of human understanding. Light, in this European project, promised emancipation. Yet the metaphor of illumination also carried ambivalence. To illuminate is to expose; to clarify is to classify. Enlightenment rationality traveled alongside colonial expansion, scientific taxonomy, and extractive systems that rendered lands, bodies, and cultures transparent to European scrutiny.

Glissant’s opacity offers a counterpoint to these universalizing ambitions. Where Enlightenment sought transparency and universality, opacity proposes relation without reduction. Light, in this sense, becomes relational rather than interrogative - illuminating without dissolving difference. Glissant’s opacity does not reject light; it reorients it. It touches without dissolving. It reveals without demanding transparency. Opacity is thus a form of care. He emphasizes that accepting another's opacity does not mean a lack of connection; rather, it makes genuine exchange possible by removing the demand for conformity.

Throughout art history, light has functioned as revelation - from the divine radiance of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro to J.M.W. Turner’ atmospheric dissolutions, where form dissolves into radiance, allowing light to exceed contour. Yet even in the Baroque illumination, shadow was never the enemy; it was the condition of depth. Without shadow, no volume. Without opacity, no form. In the twentieth century, abstract painters allowed light to emanate from color fields that seemed to absorb as much as they emit, transforming perception into experience. Contemporary installation practices further shift the viewer from observers to participants: light becomes material, atmosphere, and encounter - experienced rather than merely seen.

In these practices, shadow is not ignorance but depth. Without opacity, light has no resonance. As Gaston Bachelard suggessts in The Poetics of Space, intimacy resides in protected interiors - corners, nests, shells. To dwell is to remain partially hidden. To belong is not to be fully exposed but to be held within shared atmospheres.

Poetic language similarly sustains relational opacity. Paul Celan speaks of language that reaches “toward an other” - not to possess, but to encounter. Inger Christensen structures her poems through mathematical sequences that reveal ecological interdependence without dissolving singularities. Each element exists in relation, yet remains irreducible.

The exhibition resonates with thinkers who extend or critically reframe Glissant’s relational poetics. Christina Sharpe reflects on the ongoing afterlives of colonial histories and the forms of visibility and invisibility they generate. Françoise Lionnet explores creolization and translation as relational processes that resist fixed identities. Fred Moten articulates fugitivity and refusal as aesthetic and political strategies that challenge dominant regimes of legibility. Chus Martínez emphasizes the poetic and speculative capacities of art to imagine collective futures beyond extractive epistemologies.

Within contemporary ecological thought, light and opacity also shift beyond the human and anthropocentrism. Donna Haraway proposes “staying with the trouble” - remaining within complexity rather than clarifying them into simplified narratives. Human-centred Enlightenment placed humanity at the apex of reason and visibility. Ecosystems acknowledge that humans are not the sole bearers of light. They operate through entanglement, invisibility, and reciprocal obscurity beyond human centrality: mycelial networks communicate underground; plants photosynthesize; oceans refract light beyond human perception; stones retain geological memory. The world is not illuminated for us - it glows within its own temporalities.

In the Phenomenology of the Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel identifies recognition as fundamental to selfhood: one becomes oneself through being recognized by another. Yet recognition need not become forced assimilation and total comprehension. Through Glissant’s lense, recognition does not require total understanding. You can recognize without fully knowing. That is the ethical innovation of opacity. If Hegel sought reconciliation of individual and universal, we might propose: reconciliation must preserve opacity.

Collective futures depend not on dissolving individuality into abstract universality, but on the preservation of singularity within relation. Opacity ensures that individuality is not erased in the name of unity. Light, when relational, allows connection without assimilation. Together, they model a form of coexistence that resists both homogenization and fragmentation.

In an age of radical exposure - of data extraction, surveillance, algorithmic profiling, perpetual visibility - of what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes as the ‘society of transparency’, opacity becomes an ethical gesture. To protect the right not to be fully known is to defend plurality. To share light without erasing difference is to practice care. What remains partially hidden - layers of memory, cultural translation, diasporic relation, ecological entanglement - is not a deficit but a field of resonance.

This perspective also gestures toward older, more nature-centred modes of consciousness. Ancient cosmologies and Indigenous epistemologies long understood light and shadow not as opposites, but as complementary forces within cyclical systems. Knowledge was embedded in ritual, in seasonal rhythms, in attentive observation of land and sky. Such practices recognized mystery not as ignorance to be conquered, but as an integral dimension of existence.

The works assembled in the Opacity and Light move between concealment and revelation, luminosity and density. Some invite immersion into shadow; others emit quiet radiance. Together they create a field of resonance in which perception becomes a practice of attentiveness and imagination a political resource. They engage with what resists immediate legibility or remains only partially accessible: layers of memory, processes of cultural translation, diasporic entanglements, and the unseen dimensions of social and ecological systems.

The exhibition proposes a poetics of coexistence and evokes a slower perceptual register, one that honors opacity as protection and light as mediation - where the unseen, the quiet, and the non-extractable become perceptible as aesthetic and political qualities. Community is sustained through mutual recognition of depth. It is not built through total clarity but through mutual attunement. To coexist is to accept that the other exceeds our comprehension. The mastery required to confront today’s global challenges is not technological supremacy alone, but the cultivation of relational intelligence - an ethics rooted in difference, reciprocity, and ecological consciousness.

The exhibition invites viewers to embrace ambiguity not as a deficit, but as a form of knowledge - and to understand that what cannot be fully seen may still be deeply felt. Light as a medium of relation is what makes relational understanding possible. Opacity does not obstruct; it protects depth. Light in this sense is not an instrument of control, but a material of empathy. The realization of freedom today lies not in total clarity, but in sustaining a relational equilibrium - where individuality persists, opacity is protected, and community emerges as a dynamic, living system.

Text: Sarice Brudet

Sources:

Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition.

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard: Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter

Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation

Édouard Glissant: Kultur & Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt

Édouard Glissant: Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite

Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Archipelago

Byung-Chul Han: The Crisis of Narration

Byung-Chul Han: Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

Donna Haraway: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phänomenologie des Geistes

Axel Honneth: The Struggle for Recognition

Françoise Lionnet: The Creolization of Theory.

Fred Moten In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition.

Knepper, Steven; Stoneman, Ethan; Wyllie, Robert: Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction.

Chus Martinez: The Complex Answer

Hartmut Rosa: Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World

Christina Sharpe: In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Charles Taylor: Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition

THE SPACE //


presents


R E S O N A N C E


works and creative productions by

ANNA BOCHKOVA JULIAN KERKHOFF THOMAS SCHEIBITZ  CHRISTINE BREY
 INNA LEVINSON 
 THE SCHMIDT  STEFAN WIENS  SARICE BRUDET  SHINOH NAM SIMON HEHEMANN  HELEN HU  JULIA NORDHOLZ   ROBIN  RHODE

21.08. – 14.12.2025

The exhibition „R E S O N A N C E“ brings together the work and creative productions of 13 international contemporary artists, presenting a diverse range of positions with a multi-layered subject matter. The exhibition explores how their artistic practices and research engage with cultural and social complexities in a global context to create a space for dialogue, raising questions about complex frequencies and power dynamics that shape our human worlds and surroundings.

TO RESONATE IS TO RELATE...,


TO REVERBERATE IS TO REMEMBER, REFORM, REIMAGINE AND RECLAIM.

In a time marked and fractured by dissonance - social, cultural, political, ecological and spiritual - the concept of RESONANCE offers a counter-narrative.

How can art open space for RESONANCE in a world overwhelmed by noise? How can creative practices and research foster dialogue, mindful engagement and peace, not as passive withdrawal, but as an active, resonant force for coexistence and repair?

Artistic practice is itself a resonant act. It begins not with the need to represent, but with the impulse to respond - to time, space, silence, and the trembling presence of others. To make art is to enter into a rhythm, a call and response between material and meaning, memory and moment. The studio, the street, the landscape, and the archive are not neutral sites but fields of vibration where the artist listens and intervenes. RESONANCE in practice means staying with instability, attuning to the unspoken, allowing ambiguity to shape form. It is not about illustrating a concept, but about inhabiting relation-feeling one’s way through the unknown, echoing back what is heard, absorbed, and transformed. In this way, artistic creation becomes not a solitary act, but a relational gesture - a means of entering the world differently and inviting others into that difference.

Overwhelmed by acceleration, fragmentation, displacement and ecological imbalance, RESONANCE emerges as both a curatorial gesture and a call to recalibrate how we perceive, feel, and relate.

An aesthetic and philosophical space for reorientation, it invites us to consider the echoing threads that connect humanity and cultural multiplicity. Rather than seeking control or mastery, the exhibition foregrounds a mode of resonant being - a condition in which humans engage with the world not as detached subjects, but as vibrating participants in a shared field of meaning, affect, and becoming.

Drawing inspiration from German sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa, RESONANCE is understood as a mode of being in which the self and the world enter into a responsive, dynamic relationship. Unlike control or domination, RESONANCE arises from openness: a call and response between individuals, communities, nature, and the cosmos. In this sense, in a time when acceleration replaces reflection, and disconnection becomes default, RESONANCE is a political, ethical, and aesthetic act to transform. It is a refusal of indifference. It is the capacity to be affected, and to respond - vulnerably, attentively, and with care. A sociological and philosophical response to the silent alienation produced by modernity’s systems of efficiency, capitalism, and relentless pace.

For Rosa, RESONANCE is not harmony or sameness, but the capacity for mutual transformation in response to contact: to be touched, and to respond. This dynamic, which refuses flattening or instrumentalization, becomes the guiding rhythm of the exhibition. It proposes artworks as sites of vibratory relationality - moments in which viewers and works enter an unpredictable, affective dialogue.

While Rosa’s RESONANCE emphasizes relational reciprocity - being moved by the world and responding to it – Gaston Bachelard’s idea of REVERBERATION describes the internal, poetic consequence of that resonance:

Rosa asks: How does the world respond to our voice?


Bachelard asks: How does that response live on in us? What echoes remain?

It is here that French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s (author of the Poetics of Space and Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter) notion of REVERBERATION offers its poetic force. If RESONANCE is the world vibrating with us, REVERBERATION is what lingers inside, the echo that deepens, softens, and regenerates our psychic being. Bachelard reminds us that true transformation begins not at the surface of interaction but in the slow unfolding of inner space - in dream, memory, and elemental sensation.

“ The reverberation invites us to inhabit the image... to linger within its echo.”

In her book The Complex Answer, which contains a selection of texts aiming to enforce the idea that art is an intelligence that is influenced by ideas and the emergence of new notions but also thinking through experience, Spanish curator, art historian and writer Chus Martínez writes of art not as a solution in the traditional sense, but as a method of response that embraces complexity, ambiguity, and transformation. For Martínez, artistic research is not a tool for certainty, but a practice of becoming. RESONANCE, in this context, is not harmony but relation: the trembling contact between bodies, ideas, and realities. Following Martínez’s insistence on the poetic nature of thinking, RESONANCE does not ask for answers but cultivates a condition of response-ability. This is art's ethical and imaginative labour - to create zones where knowledge is felt rather than fixed, where relation is practiced rather than theorized. In such a space, the

act of RESONANCE becomes both an aesthetic and a political gesture: one that resists the noise of immediacy and dares to sustain a slow, resonant attention.

The artists in this exhibition move beyond representation to offer gestures of encounter. Some works vibrate with ecological sensitivity, while others dwell on diasporic memory, fractured identities, and the fragile architectures of belonging. Here,RESONANCE is not an echo of sameness but a chorus of difference, an invitation to engage with what cannot be easily contained or understood.

In this context, the ideas of Nicolas Bourriaud bring a critical artistic and curatorial dimension to RESONANCE. In Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud proposes that art is not an object, but a meeting point, a platform for human encounters, a space of shared experience that fosters new ways of being together. Art becomes a micro-utopia - temporary, fragile, but real - where human relations are formed, questioned, and reshaped. In his book Inclusions, he extends this idea to address the complexities of identity and belonging in a globalized world. For Bourriaud, RESONANCE is found in acts of inclusion that resist standardization and affirm the heterogeneity of voices, cultures, and forms. Here, art is no longer an autonomous object but a form of inter-human, inter-species, and inter-world encounter. In Bourriaud’s terms, RESONANCE is a territory where the artwork acts as a portal - of shared experience, a threshold that hosts social energy, complicity, resistance, and repair.

In the spirit of Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, this exhibition resists the flattening of identity or the imposition of a singular truth and refuses to flatten history into a single narrative. Instead, it cultivates relations through opacity, difference, and multiplicity. Glissant writes, “To consent not to be a single being...” - an idea where understanding is not immediate or linear but born of entangled perception and affective attunement. Furthermore, opacity is not felt and seen as an obstacle to understanding, but as the condition of true relation in a plural world. Some of the works in the exhibition honour the unknowable, the in-between, the untranslatable and according to Glissant’s archipelagic thinking float in proximity- related not by fixed meanings but by the currents of relation, intuition, and shared nuanced subject matter and individual perspectives.

Drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, the French philosopher explores a concept that moves beyond simple surface manipulation - it becomes a metaphysical structure, a way of thinking and inhabiting the world. The fold, for Deleuze, is not merely a physical gesture but a philosophical and ontological condition - a world composed of infinite folds, layers that contain inner spaces of becoming and transformation. Memory emerges as a resonant layer: a fold of histories and affect. It bends time, thought, material, and space into continuous transitions. Inspired by Leibniz’s Monadology, Deleuze envisions the world not as a flat plane of discrete things but as an intricate topography of relations where the inside continuously folds into the outside. The fold is a response to rigidity. It refuses linearity and finality, instead proposing multiplicity, depth, and interiority. In this sense, the fold becomes a symbol of subjectivity, where the self is never singular but an accumulation of inflections, resonances, and becomings. The subject is not a point but a series of internal reverberations - like a musical tone folding into another, generating chords of identity, memory, and affect. The fold becomes a relational principle and emerges as a gentle but radical form of resistance. It does not shout; it resonates. It does not impose; it listens. It does not resolve; it holds multiplicities together.

The exhibition „R E S O N A N C E“ would like to emphasize the concepts of RESONANCE and REVERBERATION not as a mere metaphor, but as a living principle, a relational force capable of nurturing peace, mutual responsiveness and restoring a sense of shared humanity. Humanity is not an essence, but a practice: the ongoing effort to remain in relation, in rhythm, even in the face of dissonance.

Sources:

Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space


Gaston Bachelard: Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter

Nicolas Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics


Nicolas Bourriaud: Inclusions: Aesthetics of the Capitalocene


Gilles Deleuze: The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque


Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation


Édouard Glissant: Kultur & Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt

Édouard Glissant: Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite


Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Archipelago


Axel Honneth: The Struggle for Recognition


Chus Martinez: The Complex Answer


Hartmut Rosa: Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the

World Charles Taylor: Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition

THE SPACE // February - May 2025

presents 

F R A G M E N T S  A N D  R E L A T I O N

works and creative productions by

JENNIFER BANNERT, SARICE BRUDET, CHIAU SYUAN CHAI, JOHANNES DANIEL, TRONJE THOLE VAN ELLEN, KARIN ELMERS, NICOLAS FISCHER, GREGOR HILDEBRANDT, DANIEL HÖRL, ARIANE HOSEMANN, FLORIAN HUBER, SIMONE KARL, RUDI KARGUS, JAEWON KIM, NADINE KLES, KAI LIETZKE, KENNETH LIN, CHRISTINE LIPSKI, ELISA MANIG, EDGARDO NAVARRO, RAKI NIKAHETIYA, ROBIN RHODE, JAKOB SCHEIDT, ANNA MARIA SCHMIDT, GEMMA SOLÀ SOTOS, THOMAS ZIPP, MARTHA ZONOUZI

27.02. – 28.05.2025

The exhibition „F R A G M E N T S A N D R E L A T I O N“ brings together the work and creative productions of 27 contemporary artists, presenting a diverse range of positions on themes of coexistence, cultural complexities, and the art of reconnection and bridging gaps.

Art has always been a space where fragments of history, memory, and identity are gathered, reconstructed, and reimagined. Fragments and Relation is an exhibition exploring how contemporary artistic practices engage with the complexities of coexistence, social structures, diversity, cultural richness and trauma. Through artistic research and practice, the artists in this exhibition serve as portals to unifying ideas and streams of thought - creating new and different forms of communication that transcend traditional boundaries, mindsets and ways of thinking. In a world marked by dissonance and fragmentation, this exhibition proposes that fragments are not merely remnants of something broken but pieces of a larger construct, elements that can be deconstructed, rebuilt, and reorganized into something new.

Throughout history, poets and philosophers have engaged deeply with themes of fragmentation and relation. Paul Celan’s poetry embodies the fractured nature of language and memory. At the same time, Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “constellation” in The Arcades Project offers a way to see history not as linear but as a collage of interwoven fragments. In „The Poetics of Space“, Gaston Bachelard argues that physical or mental space is shaped by memory and imagination, suggesting that artistic practice can act as a bridge between interior and exterior worlds. Memory fragments reveal the mental spaces humans inhabit, where past experiences reverberate and inform current realities.

The exhibition further engages with Chus Martínez’s essay „Clandestine Happiness: What Do We Mean by Artistic Research?“ in her book The Complex Answer, Martínez proposes that artistic research is an essential space of osmosis, a process that dissolves rigid separations between disciplines, between knowledge systems, and between experience and interpretation. She argues that the future of discovery lies in generating new communicative forms of meaning, a principle that underpins the relational and experimental approaches of the artists in this exhibition. Artistic research understands that artistic practice creates, catalyzes and generates concepts because of intuition and that the challenge lies in their formalization.

Drawing from Édouard Glissant’s „Poetics of Relation“, the exhibition embraces the idea that identity is not a fixed entity but an ever-evolving relationship between the self and the other. Glissant’s concept of “opacity” resists simplistic narratives, affirming that cultural trauma and difference should not be reduced to something easily understood or assimilated. Instead, these fragments of history, language, and memory are part of a larger living network that acknowledges past wounds while offering a vision of regeneration. His call for “archipelagic thinking” explores moving beyond singular perspectives towards a more fluid, interconnected understanding of culture and identity.

“All cultures need Relation. They do not need the universal. The universal is above. The universal tries to bring about order and clarity and the cultures must try to bring about Relation between them. We do not need the universal. The problem is that once the West is no longer dominating the world, we will no longerneed narrative either. I will not need a novel to understand culture. It will be able to come via prayer, a poem, a sing, an evocation, a silence… But it will always come via a poem.” Édouard Glissant.

Similarly, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s „The Ethics of Identity“ challenges rigid cultural categories, advocating for a more dynamic and pluralistic approach to selfhood. He argues that identities are shaped by complex influences, histories, and choices. This perspective resonates with the exhibition’s exploration of fragments as carriers of both past legacies and future possibilities.

As Nicolas Bourriaud argues in his books „Relational Aesthetics“ and „Inclusion“, art has the power to generate social interactions and forge new modes of togetherness. In his vision, artistic practice is not just about objects but about encounters, about forming relations that question and reconfigure our social fabric. In this sense, art becomes an open space where ideas, identities, and histories converge in an ongoing negotiation and renewal process.

This notion of reconstruction and transformation finds poetic resonance in the Japanese practice of „kintsugi“, where broken ceramics are mended with gold, emphasizing rather than concealing the fractures. Kintsugi is part of a philosophy of embracing human flaws and life's fragility. The “kintsugi” technique is an extension of the Japanese philosophy of „wabi-sabi“, which sees beauty in the incomplete and value simplicity. When applied to cultures, this philosophy suggests that the scars of history, the traumas and disruptions can be embraced as sites of beauty, strength, and new beginnings. Instead of erasing the past, the exhibition posits that by acknowledging and integrating the awareness of fractures, human beings can forge new narratives that honour complexity rather than erase it.

Fragments are not isolated remnants but rather pieces within a greater whole. Relational thinking suggests that understanding emerges through connecting individuals, ideas, and histories. The belief in an evolving, organic world mirrors the artistic impulse to reconstruct meaning from disparate elements, reinforcing the idea that fragmentation is not an end but a process of becoming. The ability to reflect on cultural complexity highlights the interplay between memory, displacement, and reinvention. Fragments of identity, history, or artistic form do not merely testify to rupture but serve as active agents in shaping new narratives.

The reverberations of history, artistic research, and experience echo throughout these works in thisexhibition. However, rather than being trapped in the past, the artists engage with fragments as tools of regeneration. Through their practices, they seek to open new channels of communication, form unexpected connections, and offer visions of a future shaped not by erasure but by an awareness of embracing complexity.

This exhibition is ultimately about possibilities. It envisions art as a field where the status quo is questioned and where social and moral structures are rearranged and rethought. It is about artistic practice as a space of dialogue, where diverse fragments come together not to be assimilated into a single vision but to exist in dynamic, evolving relation. By acknowledging and weaving together these fragments of history, memory, identity, and artistic practice, the exhibition „ F R A G M E N T S A N D R E L A T I O N“ offers a reflection on what it means to exist together, in relation, in a world constantly in flux.

Sources:

Kwame Anthony Appiah: The Ethics of Identity

Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project

Paul Celan. Mohn und Gedächtnis. Gedichte

Chus Martinez: "Clandestine Happiness: What Do We Mean by Artistic Research?", in: The Complex

Answer

Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation

Édouard Glissant: Kultur & Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt

Édouard Glissant: Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite

Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Archipelago

Nicolas Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics

Nicolas Bourriaud: Inclusions: Aesthetics of the Capitalocen

THE SPACE // Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec

presents 

D R E A M  J O U R N E Y S

works and creative productions by

BIRTE BOSSE, SARICE BRUDET, ZHIVAGO DUNCAN, JANINE EGGERT, NICOLAS FISCHER, PARIS GIACHOUSTIDIS, GREGOR HILDEBRANDT, JIGOO HONG, HENNING KLES, DANIEL LANNES, KAI LIETZKE, ANA SARAIVA, GEMMA SOLÀ SOTOS, TEMORSCHA ZOLTANI, MARTHA ZONOUZI

07.09. – 15.12.2024

The exhibition „D R E A M  J O U R N E Y S“ brings together the work and creative productions of 15 contemporary artists presenting a diverse range of positions.

A dream, a journey, a vision to alter the status quo. A desire for change, rearranging, questioning and rethinking social and moral structures. The journey is often as significant as the destination. And a dream, imagination or vision a starting point for a creative endeaver and change.

This exhibition draws inspiration from the movement of Surrealism, the ideas and concepts of Chus Martinez’ “The Complex Answer”, Édouard Glissant’s “Poetics of the Relation” and Nicolas Bourriaud “Planet B – Climate Change and the New Sublime” to explore interconnected themes of identity, culture, the environment and globalization emphasizing the complexities of our ever-evolving and transforming world.  In an era marked by rapid change and social upheaval, "Dream Journeys" wants to embark on an exploration of the surreal, contemporary consciousness as well as constructive and gestural abstractions; where the boundaries of reality blur and the subconscious reveals new streams of thought.

The rich tradition of Surrealism in art created a movement that has long sought to question the status quo and dismantle entrenched social structures and stereotypes. Through dreamlike imagery and unexpected juxtapositions, perceptions are challenged, urging to confront the complexities of existence and envision alternative realities.

Surrealist ideas were influenced by the rising popularity of psychoanalysis in the 1920s and 1930s and informed by the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s theories of the unconscious underpinned Surrealism’s emphasis on the creative possibilities of chance, desire and dream. The word ‘surreal’ is now commonly used as an adjective to describe the unusual or unexpected. Despite the term’s detachment from the original movement, methods and ideas generated in the context of Surrealism have endured and are recognizable in contemporary art practice.

Surrealism is a shifting term and at its core an interrogation. It refers not just to a historical moment but to a dynamic movement in the truest sense. It has traveled and evolved from place to place and time to time, and continues to do so in the now. Its scope has always been transnational, exceeding national borders as a unified call for liberation, while also taking on specific and local conditions. As a form of interrogation, Surrealism has questioned the stronghold of consciousness and control. Dreams are critical in this because, like hallucinations and delusions, they can reveal the workings of the unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) proved an early, vital stimulus for many artists’ approaches to Surrealism. Through case studies of his patients, Freud observed that dreams exposed emotions otherwise repressed by social convention. 

Surrealism depends upon a collective body committed to going beyond what can be done by the individual in isolation, often in response to political or social concerns or to question the meaning of art, conventional ways of thinking, and cultural norms. Yet the subject of desire is a recurrent theme in art associated with the movement, and Surrealism has encompassed more fluid identifications of gender and sexuality. Against a backdrop of political and social upheaval, Surrealism has intersected with the realities of displaced peoples, exiles, and those of various diasporas. Viewed across time and place, this quality has manifested in group exhibitions, collaborations as well as broadly shared and circulated values. Through the power of fragmentation and juxtaposition, art drawn to Surrealism across different circumstances and times have found ways to operate in a multidimensional space between cultures and eras.

Chus Martínez further enriches this dialogue by emphasizing the role of art as a space for community building and dialogue. By fostering connections through artistic expression, Martínez highlights the potential for creativity to bridge divides and cultivate understanding among diverse groups. Martínez’s idea of the „Complex Answer“ underscores the importance of ambiguity in artistic practice. In a world increasingly defined by binary oppositions, Martínez advocates for embracing complexity as a means to foster deeper understanding.

The artworks in this exhibition resist easy interpretations and instead invite viewers to engage in an ongoing dialogue. Each piece becomes a question mark rather than a definitive statement, encouraging to explore our own interpretations and responses. Drawing on her expertise as a curator and art historian, Martinez examines the intersections between art, politics, and society, offering insights into the role of artists in addressing pressing social issues. She emphasizes the nuanced layers of meaning embedded within artworks and the ways in which they can provoke thought and inspire change. „Can artworks and exhibitions be more than the mere exposure to individual practices, cultural trends, or taxonomic ordering of contemporary patrimony?” She emphasizes that exhibitions are not only a place to show, but a surrounding to enact the values humans care for most and a place where these values of life are being protected.

„Being in an exhibition is, in other words, like walking on a future cloud. It may seem rudimentary, standardized, even boring and yet it allows for a physical superposition of materials and thinking logics that is effective and has a deep impact in our senses and memory. I trust exhibitions to give birth to energies able to ameliorate social polarization. I also trust exhibitions with the force that may activate a renewed sense of citizenship and social and community-based solidarity and empathy. “

Édouard Glissant’s notion of "The Poetics of Relation" serves as a foundational pillar for this exhibition. Glissant examines the concept of relationality and the ways in which individuals and communities are shaped by their interactions with others. His writings emphasize the importance of diversity and interconnectedness in shaping a shared future. Glissant's notion of "Relation" advocates for an understanding of identity that transcends borders and embraces multiplicity. In a time when division often prevails, his vision serves as a reminder that differences can be sources of strength rather than barriers.

“I can change through exchanging with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self.”

His belief in the interconnectedness of cultures and identities resonates throughout the works presented here. Each piece acts as a node in a vast network, inviting dialogue and fostering an understanding that transcends geographical and cultural boundaries. Glissant’s vision encourages us to embrace complexity and multiplicity, urging to see beyond singular narratives and engage with the rich tapestry of human experience. His call for a more inclusive approach resonates deeply within the context of climate change, where collaborative efforts across cultures are essential for sustainable solutions.

Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of "The New Sublime," as articulated in his work "Planet B - Climate Change and the New Sublime“ posits that contemporary art can serve as a driving force and powerful response for addressing today's pressing issues and existential threats posed by climate change and other global crises. He argues that art has the potential to create new narratives that inspire hope and resilience in the face of overwhelming challenges and rapid technological advancement. Bourriaud’s vision encourages to seek beauty amid chaos, suggesting that through artistic expression, anxieties about the future can be confronted.

The art in this exhibition harnesses surrealism and creative expression not only as a means of personal exploration but also as a tool for collective awakening. By presenting alternate realities that challenge conventional wisdom, these works invite to imagine a world where harmony with nature is possible—a world that transcends the destructive patterns of consumption and exploitation. The new sublime challenges traditional notions of beauty by embracing discomfort, uncertainty, and awe in our contemporary experience to create a contemporary feeling of appreciation and the awareness of fragility for here and now. Within this interactive dimension art is not merely an object to be observed; it fosters social interaction and community building transforming a space into a site of encounter.

"Dream Journeys", a dream, a journey, a wave of consciousness. This exhibition tries to challenge conventional narratives, perceptions and tries to inspire new ways of thinking about coexistence. A journey where art becomes a vehicle for transformation and creates dialogue to reimagine a world with its challenges and its boundless possibilities. Each piece serves as a portal into alternate realms where imagination reigns supreme, prompting to question not only our individual realities but also the collective dreams we share as a society.

Sources:

Surrealism Beyond Borders. The Met. Exhibition Catalogue. Edited by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, 2021

Chus Martinez: The Complex Answer

Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation

Édouard Glissant: Kultur & Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt

Édouard Glissant: Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite

Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Archipelago

Nicolas Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics

Nicolas Bourriaud: Planet B – Climate Change and the New Sublime

Nicolas Bourriaud: Inclusions: Aesthetics of the Capitalocene

Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

THE SPACE //

presents the solo exhibition

S P A C E W A L K S

by

SIMON HEHEMANN

07.09. - 28.02.2025

Simon Hehemann (born 1982 in Mettingen / Germany) lives and works in Hamburg. He studied at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule Kiel and at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg with Werner Büttner.

Hehemann is considered one of the most interesting and creative artists of the younger generation, whose artistic practice includes installations, sculptures and painting. He is known for spacious installations that reveal psychological inner worlds that combine technology with soul life to create their own organisms. His partly massive, partly filigree sculptures and paper works are metaphors for interior life. They serve him to find the truth and visualize what is happening in the rooms below, in the secret. His art is a vehicle to him, which is both meaningful and realistic.

In his spatial installations, you move through complexly structured spaces - through many-part landscapes of a world of its own, which consists of kinetic objects, images, movement, light and projections. By arranging wall and floor objects with hanging structures, partly stretched through the room with threads, fragile constructions with inherently resting regularity are created.

The artist creates location-specific paths through temporary world models that mix the partly surrealistic aesthetics in the dimly flickering light with the feeling of short and sketchy memories and dream sequences. Simon Hehemann generates spaces with playfully light appearance and sensual intensity. The smaller object frames as well as its walk-in boxes, large scale collage paintings and room-filling installations function like lookouts: they open up a magnifying view of fictitious microcosmic blueprints and overarching relationships of galactic proportions. An architecture of thought and ideas that have become objects enter a discourse with the viewer.

At THE SPACE // the artist presented his installation SPACEWALKS in collaboration with his gallery Feinkunst Krüger and supported my multiple foundations.

With Spacewalks, Simon Hehemann continues his ongoing exploration of space, perception, and movement. The installation can be understood as a continuation of his previous exhibitions Aus diesem Punkt and SINUS MEDII (Feinkunst Krüger), as well as his recent large-scale work Die Seele der weißen Ameise (THE SPACE //). Hehemann presents what may be his most ambitious and complex installation to date—an immersive composition with a distinctly museal character.

Upon entering the installation, visitors find themselves within a multi-layered landscape of light, structure, and suspension. Aluminium frameworks, translucent fabrics, and reflective surfaces respond subtly to movement, transforming the environment into a dynamic field of resonance. Sightlines open and collapse; fine traces on the ground evoke unseen forces, while delicate constructions float through the air with an almost choreographed precision.

Spacewalks is less a stage than a state—an experiential architecture where physical and mental orientation merge. Hehemann fuses painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation into a comprehensive spatial concept that turns architecture itself into material. The interplay of light, structure, and motion creates a poetic system reminiscent of life’s own fractal layering: from intimate personal experience to collective and universal relations.

This immersive environment offers more than a visual encounter; it becomes a choreography of perception, memory, and transformation. Spacewalks reveals space as a living resonance body—an active medium in which seeing, thinking, and being continuously intertwine.

THE SPACE //  Juni, Juli, August 2024

presents 

P E R C E P T I O N S

works and creative productions by

JULIUS BOBKE, SASCHA BOLDT, ZOE BORISOW, SLATER BRADLEY, LENNART BREDE, SARICE BRUDET, THORBEN EGGERS, DOUMORH EL-RIZ, IHAB EL-RIZ, NICOLAS FISCHER, BERKAY GÖRENEK, GIUSEPPE GONELLA, AMÉLIE VON HEYDEBRECK, GREGOR HILDEBRANDT, HELEN HU, STEFFEN JOPP, ANDY KASSIER, ANNA KUEN, KAI LIETZKE, LUKAS MAKSAY, MERLE PAPPELBAUM, ANSELM REYLE, FRANZ STEIN, LAURA THEURICH, MEGGIE WEINHEIMER, NICK WACHS, ZIXU WANG, LUIS LORENZ ZIMMERMANN, FAMILY OF PRIME (ZIPP/KABUL), TEMORSCHA ZOLTANI, MARTHA ZONOUZI

06.06. – 03.08.2024

This exhibition brings together the works and creative productions of 31 contemporary artists exploring streams of thought about “PERCEPTIONS” and the multilayered ways we perceive.

How do we come to know the world? Through the eyes, the body, the stories we carry, the air we breathe. “PERCEPTIONS” is an exhibition that invites to dwell in the layered, shifting spaces between sensing and understanding - where seeing is never neutral, where the act of perception becomes an act of creation, negotiation, and sometimes resistance.

Bringing together works that engage with visual, auditory, corporeal and emotional registers, this exhibition explores how perception is shaped by context: cultural frameworks, memory, language, trauma, gender, and geography. The artists on view dismantle the illusion of objectivity, revealing instead how perception is always entangled - relational, embodied, situated.

Drawing on Edouard Glissant’s call for an opacity that resists full transparency or legibility, many of the works in “PERCEPTIONS” hold space for the unknowable and the unspeakable. In doing so, they counter the Western Enlightenment’s obsession with clarity and domination through vision. Instead, these works embrace multiplicity, echoing Glissant’s Poetics of Relation - a world in which we exist through and with others, not despite our differences but because of them.

Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us: “The body is our general medium for having a world.” In “PERCEPTIONS”, this becomes a call to inhabit perception not through disembodied reason but through the sensuous, vulnerable body. The artworks do not merely offer images to be seen, but portals to be felt, entered, and resonated with. This idea finds kinship in Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance, where perception is not the grasping of a fixed reality but a responsive vibration between self and world - a relationship marked by openness, an affective encounter and mutual becoming. Perception here is not a mirror but a medium of transformation. The artworks in this show act as catalysts for such resonances, offering experiences that awaken, attune, and sometimes unsettle.

In dialogue with Chus Martínez’s idea of “the complex answer” — the necessity of nonlinear, poetic, and sensuous approaches to knowledge — “PERCEPTIONS” emphasizes the epistemic power of art. The exhibition becomes a site of research and regeneration, where ways of knowing are felt before they are formulated. This curatorial approach resists the reduction of the world to data and invites instead a deepened attentiveness: to beauty, to rupture, to the invisible threads that bind.

Poetry here becomes not ornament but epistemology. Paul Celan’s elliptical language, born out of historical trauma, teaches us that perception sometimes occurs in the gaps — in the broken phrases, the silences, the unspeakable. His poetry “sings beyond the ruins,” echoing how art can bear witness without resolving. Rainer Maria Rilke’s words remind us: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Perception, in this light, becomes an ethics of being-with: a willingness to be transformed.

Yet perception is never innocent. As Frantz Fanon showed in Black Skin, White Masks, the act of seeing — and being seen — is deeply entangled with systems of power. Colonial and racial regimes of perception deform and discipline the gaze. Several works in this exhibition respond directly to such legacies, questioning who is seen, how they are read, and what it means to reclaim the right to opacity, to ambiguity, to self-determination.

We are reminded of Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, where perception is tied not only to the external world but also to the interior one. It reverberates through memory, in dreams, in solitude and imagination, the artists explore inner topographies that reconfigure how we see, hear, and feel. Perception, in this sense, becomes a site of transformation — a way to reorient the self and reimagine reality. It becomes a poetic act: one of reverie, of return, of regeneration.

The exhibition also engages with feminist, queer, and decolonial critiques that reveal how perception is politicized — how bodies are read, voices are silenced, and spaces are coded. From visual distortions and sonic dissonances to poetic interventions and haptic materials, the works challenge normative frameworks and open perception to other modes: intuitive, collective, radical.

Ultimately, “PERCEPTIONS” is a proposition — not for a singular vision of the world, but for many. For perceptions that diverge, intersect, and resonate. For practices that foreground the importance of sensitivity, attention, and care. For an aesthetics of listening, and for the possibility that perception itself can become a practice of relation and responsibility.

Curated in the spirit of transformation and multiplicity, “PERCEPTIONS” invites visitors to not only look, but to listen, to feel, and to question how we perceive — and how, through that very act, we co-create the world. This exhibition calls for perception as practice: tender, resistant, embodied, and ever in relation.

Sources:

Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard: Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter

Paul Celan: Selected Poems of Paul Celan

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks

Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation

Édouard Glissant: Kultur & Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt

Édouard Glissant: Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite

Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Archipelago

Chus Martinez:  The Complex Answer

Maurice Merleau-Ponty; “Phenomenology of Perception”

Rainer Maria Rilke: poem “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”

Hartmut Rosa: Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World

THE SPACE // March, April, May 2024

presents 

T R A N S I T I O N S
works and creative productions by

TJORG DOUGLAS BEER, MARIE BOISELLE, SARICE BRUDET, ELENA BULYCHEVA, CHIAO-HAN CHUEH, KYLE EGRET, DOUMORH EL-RIZ, ANNA LENA GRAU, CHEN GUO, DANIEL HAHN, GREGOR HILDEBRANDT, DANIEL HÖRNER, JAKOB HARMS, SIMON HEHEMANN, HELEN HU, FLORIAN HUBER, NANHEE KIM, SUJIN KIM, JAN KOSCHNITZKE, NICHOLAS MBOYA, TINA OELKER, STEFAN PFEIFFER, HUSSEIN EL RAYESS, IMAD EL RAYESS, JESSICA REES, ANSELM REYLE, ANTON SCHÖN, LENA SCHRAMM, ANNA STEINERT, NICK WACHS, PAUL WALLINGTON, CHRISTOPH WÜSTENHAGEN, THOMAS ZIPP, TEMORSCHA ZOLTANI

07.03. – 11.05.2024

The exhibition „T R A N S I T I O N S“ brings together the work and creative productions of 34 contemporary artists presenting a diverse range of positions.

The exhibition wants to explore interconnected themes of identity, culture, the environment and globalization emphasizing the complexities of our ever-evolving and transforming world. Contemplating the fluid nature of identity and the ways in which we navigate cultural shifts and transformations.

Transition, a change or shift from one state, conditions, subject, place, etc. to another. A metamorphoses - creating, developing, evolving something new or different from a pool of the already existing.

The exhibition draws inspiration from the ideas and writings of renowned thinkers Chus Martínez, Edouard Glissant and Nicolas Bourriaud.

Spanish writer and curator, Chus Martínez, has a background in philosophy and art history. Her book "The Complex Answer" is a compelling exploration of the complexities of contemporary art and culture. Martinez delves into the multifaceted nature of artistic expression and the ways in which art can challenge conventional thinking and spark meaningful dialogue.

Drawing on her expertise as a curator and art historian, Martinez examines the intersections between art, politics, and society, offering insights into the role of artists in addressing pressing social issues. She emphasizes the nuanced layers of meaning embedded within artworks and the ways in which they can provoke thought and inspire change. „Can artworks and exhibitions be more than the mere exposure to individual practices, cultural trends, or taxonomic ordering of contemporary patrimony? “

She emphasizes that exhibitions are not only a place to show, but a surrounding to enact the values humans care for most and a place where these values of life are being protected.

„Being in an exhibition is, in other words, like walking on a future cloud. It may seem rudimentary, standardized, even boring and yet it allows for a physical superposition of materials and thinking logics that is effective and has a deep impact in our senses and memory. I trust exhibitions to give birth to energies able to ameliorate social polarization. I also trust exhibitions with the force that may activate a renewed sense of citizenship and social and community-based solidarity and empathy. “

"The Poetics of Relations" by French philosopher and writer Edouard Glissant is a seminal work that explores the interconnectedness of cultures, identities, and histories. In this book, Glissant examines the concept of relationality and the ways in which individuals and communities are shaped by their interactions with others. He emphasizes the importance of embracing diversity and difference, advocating for a more inclusive and interconnected world and reflect themes of interconnectivity, hybridity, and multiplicity. “I can change through exchanging with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self.”

"Inclusions" by Nicolas Bourriaud is a thought-provoking exploration of the concept of inclusion in contemporary art and society. In this book, Bourriaud emphasizes the idea of creating spaces and experiences that foster connection, dialogue, and understanding among individuals from diverse backgrounds.

Drawing on the principles of relational aesthetics, Bourriaud argues that art has the power to bring people together and bridge cultural divides. By emphasizing collaboration, interaction, and exchange, he suggests that art can serve as a catalyst for social change and transformation.

Art has the ability to push boundaries and question established norms. Our exhibition TRANSITIONS would like to serve as a space for reflection and introspection, inviting the individual to consider the myriad perspectives and interpretations that art can offer and foster connections.

Sources:

Chus Martinez: The Complex Answer
Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation
Édouard Glissant: Kultur & Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt Édouard Glissant: Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Archipelago
Nicolas Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics
Nicolas Bourriaud: Plant B – Climate Change and the New Sublime Nicolas Bourriaud: Inclusions: Aesthetics of the Capitalocene

THE SPACE // Nov, Dec 2023, Jan 2024

presents 

S H A P E D  B Y  T I M E

works and creative productions by

TJORG DOUGLAS BEER, SASCHA BOLDT, SARICE BRUDET, TIM BRUENING, ALEJANDRA CAICEDO, HYUNJIN CHOI, DANIEL ECKOLDT, LORENZ EGLE, CHEN GUO, GREGOR HILDEBRANDT, OLIVER KAPS, JAEWON KIM, SUJIN KIM, CLAUDIA KLEIN, LARA KOCH, KAI LIETZKE, CHRISTINE LIPSKI, TINA OELKER, EGLE OTTO, ANSELM REYLE, ANSELM REYLE, CAMILLE SCHAEFFER, CHRISTIAN SCHOPPE, CHRISTIAN VOIGT, PAUL WALLINGTON, MEGGIE WEINHEIMER, SORAYA WÜLLNER, THOMAS ZIPP, TEMORSCHA ZOLTANI, MARTHA ZONOUZI, SOUND BY RAWR

23.11.2023 – 27.01.2024

The exhibition „SHAPED BY TIME“ brings together the work and creative productions of 30 contemporary artists presenting a diverse range of positions.

The exhibition wants to reflect on the intricate relationship between time, culture and the environment emphasizing the complex and multifaceted nature of time and its influence on our lives.

As humans we navigate through different temporal dimensions – past, present, and future – encountering impermanence, decay and transformation as integral aspects of our existence.

This exhibition wants to encourage a dialogue with time - challenging our perception of time by highlighting the interdependence and dynamic interplay between time and nature. Emphasizing the delicate balance between human intervention and the forces of nature.

Edouard Glissant, a prominent Caribbean philosopher, believed in the importance of cultural diversity and the interconnectedness of all cultures. His concepts emphasize the constant exchange and blending of cultures, resulting in the creation of new identities and narratives. Through Glissant's lens, the individual can explore how time is not a linear progression but a complex web of interwoven stories, encounters and experiences. Our identities are shaped not only by our personal experiences but also by the historical and cultural contexts in which we exist.

In his seminal work, "Poetics of Relation," Glissant explores the concept of relational identity and its profound connection to the passage of time.

The Fluidity of Identity:

Glissant argues that identity is not fixed but rather fluid, constantly evolving through encounters with others and the world around us. Time acts as a catalyst for this evolution, allowing to transcend boundaries and embrace multiple perspectives. As we navigate through different temporal dimensions, we are shaped by the experiences, memories, and narratives that intertwine with our own.

Historical Contexts:

Identities are deeply rooted in historical contexts, which provide a framework for understanding ourselves and others. Time allows us to reflect on the legacies of the past, acknowledging both the triumphs and injustices that have shaped our present reality. By engaging with history, we gain a deeper appreciation for the complexities of identity formation and recognize the importance of inclusivity in shaping a more just future.

Cultural Diversity:

Time also plays a crucial role in shaping cultural diversity. As societies evolve over generations, traditions, languages and customs transform - reflecting the dynamic nature of human existence. Glissant emphasizes that embracing cultural diversity fosters dialogue and enriches our understanding of one another. Through time, we learn to appreciate the beauty and complexity of different cultures, recognizing that they are integral to our shared human experience.

Shapes, Marks, and Traces:

In contemplating the influence of time on our existence - shapes, marks, and traces that are left behind as testaments to the passage of time are of great significance. These physical imprints carry within them narratives of growth, decay, and transformation, embodying the essence of Edouard Glissant's concept of "trace" – the remnants of past experiences that shape our present identities.

Just as Glissant emphasizes the importance of acknowledging historical contexts in understanding ourselves, these shapes and marks serve as tangible reminders of our collective history. They bear witness to the struggles and triumphs of those who came before us, leaving an indelible imprint on our cultural landscapes. Through time, these imprints become part of our shared heritage, connecting us to a larger narrative that transcends individual experiences.

Nicolas Bourriaud, a contemporary art theorist, introduced the concept of "relational aesthetics." He argued that art should be seen as a social encounter, a platform for dialogue and interaction. By examining Bourriaud's ideas, we investigate how time is shaped through our interactions with art and how it can foster new perspectives and connections. His concept of relational aesthetics further expands upon Glissant's ideas. Bourriaud suggests that art has the potential to create social bonds and foster connections between individuals.

Shapes, marks and traces also connect to the concept of the new sublime. The new sublime challenges traditional notions of beauty by embracing the awe-inspiring power found in natural processes and phenomena. As we witness the erosion of rocks or observe how nature reclaims man-made structures over time, we are confronted with a sublime beauty that lies beyond human control. He argues that in an era marked by environmental crises and technological advancements, our perception of the sublime must evolve. The new sublime embraces the awe-inspiring power found in natural processes and phenomena, inviting us to reflect on our place within a rapidly changing world.

Art has the ability to use the transformative power of time and contemplates its impact on our individual and collective identities, our social interactions and structures. Time acts as a catalyst for change, molding our identities and existence through a constant interplay between past, present, and future.

Sources: 

Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation

Édouard Glissant: Kultur & Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt

Édouard Glissant: Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite

Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Archipelago

Nicolas Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics

Nicolas Bourriaud: Plant B – Climate Change and the New Sublime

Nicolas Bourriaud: Inclusions: Aesthetics of the Capitalocene

THE SPACE // Sept, Oct 2023

presents 

S E N S E  OF  B E L O N G I N G 

works and creative productions by

ARMIN BOEHM, SARICE BRUDET, ORNELLA FIERES, ISABELLE GRAEFF, GREGOR HILDEBRANDT, HELEN HU, THEO HUBER, LUDWIG KREUTZER, KAI LIETZKE, DAVID RODRIGUEZ MUNOZ, TINA OELKER, HANNAH PARR, JEANNINE PLATZ, ANSELM REYLE, NICK WACHS, DERK INSA WAGNER, IDAN WEIß, THOMAS ZIPP, TEMORSCHA ZOLTANI, MARTHA ZONOUZI, SOUND BY RAWR

10.09 – 26.10.2023

The exhibition „SENSE OF BELONGING“ brings together the work of 20 contemporary artists presenting a diverse range of positions. The exhibition wants to explore and reflect on the intricate and multifaceted aspects of belonging, exploring its significance in shaping our identities, fostering community, and nurturing a sense of purpose and a sense of self.

We live in a globalized, rather off-balanced and interconnected world defined by a correlation between the physical and virtual engagement with the surrounding where screens, interfaces and algorithms become a dominating factor. How does an entangled world and the status quo shape a sense of belonging on a global scale? How does a not static sense of belonging evolves and adapts to the changing world around the self? How do societal shifts, globalization, and technological advancements impact a sense of belonging and how can the self navigate and embrace new forms of connection and community?

Édouard Glissant, a French philosopher and poet who grew up in Martinique, emphasizes that a sense of belonging emerges from embracing diversity and recognizing the interconnectedness of cultures. His concept of "Poetics of Relation" points out the importance of dialogue, exchange, and creolization as means to foster a collective identity that transcends borders. Glissant's works, such as "The Poetics of Relation" invite to reflect on the power of cultural hybridity and the potential for a global sense of belonging. His theories bring up central questions about the construction of identity, memory, and the world humans strive to create. “I can change through exchanging with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self.” By examining the complexities of identity formation, the self can aim to foster a deeper understanding of how our unique characteristics contribute to our sense of belonging in the world.

Nicolas Bourriaud, a French art critic and curator, explores the notion of belonging through his concept of "Relational Aesthetics." He argues that art can create social bonds and generate a sense of belonging by engaging viewers in participatory experiences. Bourriaud's influential book, "Relational Aesthetics," challenges traditional notions of art as a static object, emphasizing instead the importance of human interaction and shared experiences. Through his ideas, the self can examine how art can foster connections and create spaces for belonging in our increasingly fragmented society. Bourriaud highlights the role of art in bridging gaps and creating a shared sense of identity. His works emphasize the transformative power of art in creating social bonds and fostering a sense of belonging within communities.

Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher, focuses on the politics of recognition as a crucial aspect of belonging. He argues that individuals need their identities to be recognized and affirmed by others in order to feel a sense of belonging. Taylor's seminal work, "The Politics of Recognition," explores the complexities of identity formation and the struggles faced by marginalized groups in their quest for recognition. By examining Taylor's ideas, we delve into the challenges and possibilities of creating inclusive societies that acknowledge and value diverse identities.

Through these unique perspectives, the exhibition aims to explore questions and streams of thought about the intricate relationship between identity, culture, and the feeling of belonging in today's diverse and interconnected world. Art in this context has the ability to contribute that an individual can live their authentic self.

Sources:

Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation

Édouard Glissant: Kultur & Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt

Édouard Glissant: Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite

Nicolas Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics

Charles Taylor: Die Politk der Anerkennung

THE SPACE // July, August 2023

presents 

W A V E S 

works and creative productions by

SARICE BRUDET, NICULAI CONSTANTINESCU, TRONJE THOLE VAN ELLEN, MICHAEL GRIEVE, MARLET HECKHOFF, AMELIE VON HEYDEBRECK, ARIANE HOSEMANN, CLAUDIA KLEIN, KAI LIETZKE, CHRISTINE LIPSKI, LUCKY BAMBINO, DAVID RODRIGUEZ MUNOZ, TINA OELKER, VIGDIS, TEMORSCHA ZOLTANI, MARTHA ZONOUZI, SOUND BY RAWR

27.07 – 31.08.2023

The exhibition „WAVES“ brings together the work of 15 contemporary artists presenting a diverse range of positions and wants to explore questions and streams of thought about the concept and idea of „WAVES”. We live in a globalized, rather off-balanced and interconnected world defined by a correlation between the physical and virtual engagement with the surrounding where screens, interfaces, algorithms and concrete walls become a dominating factor.

In physics, mathematics, engineering, and related fields, a WAVE is a propagating dynamic disturbance, (change from equilibrium) of one or more quantities. In other words or in a figurative sense: „ups“ and „downs“ sometimes striving towards a state of balance in a constant movement.

Édouard Glissant, a French philosopher and writer who grew up in the Caribbean, explored the concept of waves as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of cultures and the fluidity of identities. His ideas on archipelagic thinking were revolutionary. Glissant's archipelago thinking refers to his philosophical concept that emphasizes the interconnectedness and diversity of cultures, identities, and histories. It suggests that the world is made up of multiple islands, each with its own unique characteristics, but all connected through a network of relationships. An archipelago, literally, is a cluster of small islands. When Glissant uses the word, he imagines something which exists in opposition to the staid constraints of the continents; which, drifting, “must” encounter the realities of different, foreign places. His theories bring up central questions about the construction of identity, memory, and the world humans strive to create. “I can change through exchanging with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self.”

Glissant believed that embracing this diversity and recognizing the value of different cultures can lead to a more inclusive and harmonious society. He argued against the idea of a single, dominant culture or identity, advocating instead for a celebration of difference and a rejection of homogenization.

Archipelago thinking encourages to view the world as a complex tapestry of interconnectedness, where each individual and culture contributes to the overall richness and complexity of the whole. It invites to appreciate and learn from the diverse perspectives and experiences of others, fostering a sense of unity in diversity. His ideas inspire to reflect on the constant movement and exchange that shape our world.

Nicolas Bourriaud, a contemporary art theorist, introduced the concept of relational aesthetics, which emphasizes the importance of social interactions in art. Waves, in this context, can be seen as a representation of the dynamic relationships between artists, artworks, and audiences. Bourriaud defined the approach as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." Bourriaud explored the impact of climate change on contemporary art through the lens of the sublime, a notion defined in the 18th century by the philosopher Edmund Burke. The New Sublime refers to a contemporary approach to the sublime, where artists explore the awe-inspiring and overwhelming aspects of nature and technology. WAVES in all their different forms (in nature, physics etc.) with their immense power and beauty, but also with their danger and sometimes unpredictable transformation serve as this new sense of the sublime.

Bourriauds emphasizes that the awareness of climate change has modified the collective relationship to the earth in many ways, but it also impacts the human gaze. If humans used to regard the planet as merely a backdrop for their activities, a decoration - an environment - they now feel completely engulfed by its atmosphere, soils, and oceans, which have become potential threats. Within this context, the old notion of the sublime finds a new life in art.

Frequencies, vibrations, and energies are fundamental elements of WAVES. Art has the ability to use this transformative power of „WAVES“ and their impact on our senses and the self.

Sources: 

Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation

Édouard Glissant: Kultur & Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt

Édouard Glissant: Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite

Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Archipelago

Nicolas Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics

Nicolas Bourriaud: Plant B – Climate Change and the New Sublime

THE SPACE // May, June 2023

presents 

B E G E G N U N G E N 

works and creative productions by

CARLOTTA BARTELS, MARIE BOISELLE, SARICE BRUDET, CHIAO-HAN CHUEH, THOMAS HAUPT GREGOR HILDEBRANDT, HELEN HU, THEO HUBER, ALEXANDER ISKIN, KAI LIETZKE, PHOEBE MINOUCHE, ANSELM REYLE, JETTE ROPERS, SELASSIE, MILEN TILL, RUSCHA VOORMANN, NICK WACHS, THOMAS ZIPP, TEMORSCHA ZOLTANI, MARTHA ZONOUZI, SOUND BY RAWR

Vernissage, 11.05.2023, 6 -10 PM    12.05 – 30.06.2023

The exhibition “ B E G E G N U N G E N” brings together the work of 20 contemporary artists presenting a diverse range of positions. 

The exhibition wants to explore questions and streams of thought about the essence of „encounters” in a globalized and interconnected world defined by a correlation between the physical and virtual engagement with the surrounding.

French writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant formulated the following phrase:

“I can change through exchanging with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self.”

His theories bring up central questions about the construction of identity, memory, and the world humans strive to create. Glissant had developed an experimental and transdisciplinary project, “a museum that seeks”, as opposed to Western museums that “have found”. The inventor of the concept of mondialité, defined his museum as “the place where places in the world are brought into contact with other places in the world”. Aiming for a great diversity of representations and a multiplicity of voices, emphasizing the individual sensibility of artists over the great universalist narratives.

Encounters pave the way to independent thinking and new situations arise from encounters between differences.  

According to Hegel in order to be able to unfold their full power, an idea must meet another idea. A thesis alone cannot really be expressed without antithesis, without negation, without confrontation with it. The same applies to the individual. The confrontation with another consciousness is necessary in order to learn against its differences, to position oneself, to know one's own worth and to develop further. How are we supposed to know where we are and who we are without confronting the difference? Without an encounter with the other, an encounter with ourselves is not possible. An individual must experience being different in order to grasp their uniqueness. The objective recognition of oneself. Without the experience of being different the Self can’t know itself. In order to develop, the individual needs to encounter others.

Édouard Glissant says that culture is created through differences. Thinking about origins in order to create something new. Whenever different civilizations meet, friction creates domination, but also resistance and this creates something again. To understand or sense the world better, that's the goal when looking at art. If you go to an exhibition and don't have any questions afterwards, then it's probably not a good exhibition. According to Glissant digital technologies create worldwide connections at unprecedented speed, they destroy a central prerequisite for real encounters through their leveling means: the recognition that we always don't understand each other, that not everything is translatable. In his last essay, Glissant still insists on the concept of opacity: "Because you have the right to be incomprehensible, first and foremost to yourself." The unpredictability of encounters is therefore a source of hope.

Art has the ability to create new spaces of encounter, creating worlds and a dialog. Artists have always created worlds, even not in a technological sense. No matter what medium artists use, they are portals to world creation.

Encountering the other has the power to change something, shape the Now and to offer visions. 

THE SPACE // 2022

The exhibitions at THE SPACE // are centered around the human mind, body and soul and explore how the Self is transformed and shaped by society, technology and its relation to nature and the cosmos.

How does the Self and the perception of the Self correlate with the outside and its surrounding in a seemingly unpredictable world shaped by globalization, technology and climate change?

How can the Self retain optimism to create change and disconnect from set and conditioned perceptions, preconceptions and prejudices in order to alter these perspective, question the status quo and self-limiting beliefs?

The artists explore notions and reasoning of contemporary consciousness, constructive abstraction, inner and outer worlds. Questions center around the intuitive mind vs the rational, resonance, energies and frequencies, concepts of time and balance, empathy and cultural diversity.

For Édouard Glissant (French writer, poet and philosopher) the "poetics of the relationship" (Poétique de la Relation) stands for a human identity that is defined by the variety of relationships and not by an ethnic one, namely descent. In this context, he distinguishes between “globalization” (Fr. mondialisation) and “globality” (Fr. mondialité): “What is called globalization is assimilation at the lowest level, the rule of multinational corporations, standardization and unregulated liberalism at the markets of the world. But for me it is just the flip side of a wonderful reality that I call globality.” Globality and globalization are two sides of the same phenomenon. By "globalization" Glissant means the capitalist project of multinational corporations and the associated cultural leveling (standardization). GLOBALITY, on the other hand, harbors productive potential through creative interactions between cultures. This is how complex cultures (cultures composites) arise.

The exhibitions would like to emphasize humanity as a practice and the optimism of GLOBALITY. Each exhibition explores different nuances of this subject matter and streams of thoughts.

The first exhibition in 2022 with the title AN (SICHT) EN was based on “ Change of Perspective” and the optimism of Gloabality in contrast to Glabalization.

Vernissage 30.06.2022 / Finissage 25.08.2022

The second exhibition IDENTITY explored ways and mindsets of defining identity detached from marginalizing, labeling and boxing concepts. Seeking ways of true identities to nourish complex and diverse cultures.

Vernissage: 08.09.2022 / Finissage 27.10.2022

The third exhibition DAS GE (FÜHL) ZU (FÜHL) EN centered around different perspectives what it means and implies “to feel” in a contemporary and interconnected world. Exploring balancing acts between rationality and intuition, balancing acts between different mindsets and perceptions.

Vernissage 17.11.2022

THE SPACE // Nov, Dec 2022

presents  

DAS GE(FÜHL) ZU (FÜHL)EN Vernissage 17.11.2022 / Closing 30.11.2022

works and creative productions by

MARIE BOISELLE, SARICE BRUDET, NEZAKET EKICI / OPERNDORF AFRIKA, DANIEL ECKOLDT, GREGOR HILDEBRANDT, ANDY HOPE 1930, ARIANE HOSEMANN, HELEN HU, NANHEE KIM, KAI LIETZKE, ANSELM REYLE, NICK WACHS, THOMAS ZIPP, TEMORSCHA ZOLTANI

THE SPACE // June, July, August 2022

presents  

AN (SICHT) EN Vernissage 30.06.2022 / Finissage 25.08.2022

works and creative productions by

SARICE BRUDET, KAI LIETZKE, JETTE ROPERS, NICK WACHS, EVA WOCHNER, TEMORSCHA ZOLTANI

THE SPACE // Sept, Oct 2022

presents  

IDENTITY Vernissage: 08.09.2022 / Finissage 27.10.2022

works and creative productions by

LINDA BÖSE, SARICE BRUDET, NOAH KRAUS, KAI LIETZKE, CHRISTINE LIPSKI, NICK WACHS, TEMORSCHA ZOLTANI