Guided TourComing to Terms with Today’s Berlin
Guided Tour von Arts of the Working Class
The last of four marathon parcours traces Berlin’s contested spaces—sites of history, memory, and power—and their entanglement with contemporary artistic production. From monumental institutions to intimate studios, the tour foregrounds the tensions that shape the city today: the fluctuation between remembrance and reinvention, visibility and exclusion, provocation and reflection. To come to terms with Berlin is to confront its histories, to inhabit its contradictions, and to explore how art, memory, and embodied experience intertwine in shaping the present.
To walk this route is to practise another kind of remembering: gestures that pause, meander, and refuse to conform. Here, memory itself becomes choreo-poetic, creating fleeting solidarities in the cracks of institutional walls.
Wir beginnen mit Brunch im polarising Humboldt Forum (11am), where, together with curator Michael Dieminger, we look at colonial legacies and the ethics of representation, and their project ›South-to-South: A Meeting on African and Afro-diasporic Technologies‹. Outside of the BAW programme, Helga Paris’ intimate portraits at Fotografiska (12pm) widen perspectives on urban life, capturing the subtle textures of everyday experience.
An Open House at the Boros Collection (1pm) highlights the intersection of private and public. Visiting this collection housed in a former bunker, we will discuss questions about space, secrecy, and access. Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2pm) presents ›Global Fascisms‹, reflecting on the circulation of authoritarian ideologies locally and globally. A brief snack at Weltwirtschaft (3pm) allows participants to exchange impressions before moving on to engage with performance and participatory works.
At 4.45pm Yoko Onos ›Bells for Peace‹ marks the city with sound, ritual, and collective listening. Across Berlin, visits to Stiftung St. Matthäus: ›LICHTAN LICHTAUS‹, Gisela Getty: Ashes to Rishikesh bei Ryan Mendoza Studios (6pm) and Luiza Prados ›Send Nudes (The Fall of Cyrene)‹ atNeun Kelche explore memory, intimacy, and corporeal politics.
The day concludes at haubrok foundation (7.30pm), where light, furniture, and monumental works by Carol Bove, Martin Boyce, Christoph Büchel, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Douglas Gordon, Stefan Kern, Carolyn Lazard, Ghislaine Leung, Tobias Madison, Jonathan Monk, Philippe Parreno, Markus Schinwald, Florian Slotawa, Franz West, Johannes Wohnseifer, and Heimo Zobernig invite reflection on accumulation, display, and aesthetic negotiation. Here, the exhibition itself stages the tension between preservation and transformation—asking how today’s Berlin can acknowledge the residue of its past while rehearsing other futures.
Through these passages, three urgencies recur:
Colonial residues embedded in Berlin’s cultural memory; archives captured as tools of authority rather than of emancipation; and the necessity of embodied resistance, where protest choreographs memory beyond official scripts.
Termine
Sat, 14 SEP, 11am—9pm