Guided Tour

Fractured Authorities: Institutions, Archives, and the Private Gaze

Institutions promise safety, yet their silences are often louder than their proclamations. They curate authority and control through their structures, collections, and acquisitions. This itinerary traces how Berlin’s cultural landscape stages power—through museums, foundations, and private spaces—and how artists fracture those claims of inevitability.

To walk this route is to practise another way of reading institutions: not as monuments of authority but as terrains of contradiction, where memory becomes rehearsal, interruption, and refusal.

We begin at the Julia Stoschek Foundation (12pm), where the sweeping survey of Mark Leckey, ›Enter Thru Medieval Wounds‹, traces pop culture, youth, and media across two decades. Leckey draws us into these mediated experiences, revealing how perception and memory are shaped—and unsettled—by technology, quietly undermining the authority of the institutional frame while opening space for alternative narratives.

We visit kennedy+swan’s exhibition at the Schering Stiftung for an in-house tour (1pm) examining who defines value and visibility. Across media, their work exposes the subtle operations of control embedded in institutional and social frameworks.

Lunch at Hamburger Bahnhof (2pm) is followed by a talk with Petrit Halilaj (3pm), whose fabulistic display of European ruins transforms history into a fragile and imaginative record. The body becomes both archive and refusal, a site where memory and imagination collide. At Galerie Wedding (4.30pm), Pınar Öğrenci’s ›Cemetery of the Nameless‹ confronts erasure and anonymity, insisting on stories marked by migration, struggle, and survival. Interventions by Cana Bilir-Meier and Nnenna Onuoha at Sinema Transtopia dismantle the purported objectivity of archives, revealing the partiality and politics embedded in institutional knowledge.

At C/O Berlin (6.30pm), a conversation with Julian Rosefeldt situates performative gestures within institutional frameworks, examining how art negotiates authority, narrative, and historical expectation. The evening closes with a tour through Private Collections (8pm), where the act of collecting itself becomes contested ground, revealing how intimacy and possession can unsettle institutional authority and rehearse other genealogies.

Through these passages, three urgencies recur: The ways institutions capture history yet remain haunted by what they cannot contain; the performativity of archives, where power and memory are continuously negotiated; and the necessity of embodied resistance, where gestures, stories, and performances refuse to be subsumed under institutional authority.

Dates

Sat, 13 SEP, 12—10pm