Trauma presents Crit Club Berlin in collaboration with Texte zur Kunst

Crit Club is a performance where two teams debate an unrealistic question about art. One side argues for, the other against—until they switch roles midway through, challenged to defend the very position they just tried to dismantle. True to its spirit, every showdown comes with a sport on the sidelines. Past iterations have included boxing, ping-pong, taekwondo, and even pole vaulting. For Berlin, the stakes get higher: arguments will collide with tackles as the Berlin Adlerbrings American football into the arena of debate.

The Berlin line-up features: 
Abbas Zahedi, artist based in Ladbroke Grove, West London
Flaka Haliti, artist and educator based between Prishtina and Berlin
Kabir Jhala, journalist based in between London and Mumbai
Lisa Long, curator and writer, based in Berlin.

Moderated by Kate Brown, art critic and curator based in Berlin

In a field where disagreement feels increasingly risky, Crit Club creates space for critical play. Rather than rehearsing praise or silence, participants are humorously invited to engage in disagreement—as performance, as roleplay, as thought experiment. By reframing critique as a contextual performance, Crit Club pushes artists, curators, and writers into unfamiliar roles, broadening perspectives and inviting new forms of criticality.

Trauma was the first to present Crit Club, in March 2024 at its original venue in Berlin featuring a muay thai boxing match with the two-times world cup champion Stanislav Perzhanovskyi. Since then, the debate format has traveled with Cem A. to Hong Kong, Utrecht, Dubai, London, Bucharest, Zagreb, Düsseldorf, Kassel, Ghent or Freiburg.

Founded in 2018, Trauma has built a reputation for commissioning cross-disciplinary projects that challenge conventional art formats and support collaborative works at the intersection of visual art, music, and performance. Trauma actively challenged the art world's entrenched hierarchies by bringing subcultural, youth-driven, and often marginalized artistic practices into contexts that typically dismiss or exoticize them. After seven years of programmingon Heidestraße (Berlin), Trauma transitioned into a nomadic curatorial platform. Expanding beyond Germany, it continues to evolve as an international instigator and conceptual infrastructure, adapting to context while fostering experimental, often ephemeral encounters.

This event has been organised in collaboration with Texte zur Kunstto coincide with the magazine's September issue, No. 139 on Sports. This issue takes a comparative look at sports and art, focusing on the distinct inherent logics of the two fields, which rely on specific rules and rituals to distance themselves from normative societal orders.

Cem A. is an artist with a background in anthropology. He is known for running the art meme page @freeze_magazineand for his site-specific installations. His work explores themes such as virality and performativity, often through collaborative projects. His selected solo exhibitions, performances and interventions include Kunstsammlung NRW, Barbican Centre, ZKM Karlsruhe, Berlinische Galerie andLouisiana Museum. His work was also included in documenta fifteen, Istanbul Modern, Mudam Luxembourg, Klima Biennale Vienna, and Freiburg Biennial. He has held lectures at Royal College of Art, London; Head, Geneva; Kask, Ghent; Pratt Institute, New York; and HDK Valand, Gothenburg.

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