atb# 123 Milena Bonilla | Yupanqui Ramos

Magic Resistance
Opening: Friday July 24, start 7 p.m. with
Performance by Wirya Budaghi and Anguezomo Nze Mba Bikoro

Exhibition: July 25, 2026 – August 30, 2026
Curation: Anguezomo Nze Mba Bikoro, muSa michelle mattiuzzi, Andrea Goetzke

Open by appointment:
Reading Sessions: August 27th & 28th at 6:30 PM
Film Screening: August 28th at 9 PM

Finissage (Closing Event): Sunday, August 30, 2026, 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM


Inspired by the radical philosophies of Gus Speth, Frantz Fanon, and Sylvia Wynter, this exhibition calls for a profound relational, spiritual, ecological and material transformation, showcasing how communities—historically led by women freedom fighters—re-code cultural memories to resist capitalist extraction and restore planetary solidarity. Grounded in a feminist formulation of social justice, this collaboration between Yupanqui Ramos and Milena Bonillapositions ecological care and “plant companionship” as vital modes of territorial defense. Both artists explore how humans and flora toether resists colonial control, demonstrating how intersectional care empowers human connection to the soil and activates political resistance.

YUPANQUI RAMOS (b. 1988 Guanajuato, México) is a multidisciplinary artist and costume designer based in Berlin. Her practice bridges, performance art, installation and video to critically examine colonial dynamics within environmental contexts. Intertwining biotechnology, ancestral knowledge, and more-than-human histories to forge alternative connections between human and non-human worlds. Her work incorporates traditional craft techniques with contemporary artistic forms, Ramos invites to question and reimagine the intricate relationships between culture and nature, interrogating scientific colonialism, ecological disruption, and the extraction of biological resources. Ramos’s work has recently been shown at Hosek Contemporary (2026), 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025), Sophiensæle (2025), SAVVY Contemporary Berlin (2024), Humboldt Forum, Berlin (2024), Thalía Theater (2023),  Kampnagel (2022), Sprechwerk Hamburg (2022), and Beaux-Arts de Paris (2020).
www.yupanquiramos.com

By retracing Rosa Luxemburg’s botanical legacy and her own deep personal connection to plants during her political struggle, Milena Bonilla’s video trilogy, I am life, and life is beautiful (A conversation guided by Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium with herbalist and dancer Shelley Elkin), uses Luxemburg’s historic herbarium as a unique meeting point to intersect different cultural traditions of plant companionship, ultimately delivering a powerful eco-feminist critique of colonial capitalism. In collaboration with Shelley Etkin, the work weaves somatic movement with historical archive to reframe prison-era botany as a vital tool for survival and resistance. Introducing “plant companionship” as political defiance, Bonilla connects environmental care to decentralized, female-led ecological farming traditions, positioning flora and ecosystems as active participants in planetary liberation. The artists’ works will be expanded alongside reading sessions exploring authors such as Denise Ferreira da Silva, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Sylvia Wynter, Silvia Federici, Ros Gray & Sheila Sheikh and Rosa Luxemburg, aiming to re-examine reparations for colonial forensic crimes through the lenses of agricultural exploitation, eco-feminist movements, environmental racism and queer ecologies.

Through feminist ecological resistance and body-centered healing, Wirya Budaghi and Anguezomo Nze Mba Bikoro performances for the opening, position the earth as an active participant in human liberation, showcasing how anti-colonial land defense and communal practices—from Kurdish eco-villages to Amazigh-inspired sonic therapy—are essential for overcoming state and patriarchal violence. The reading sessions take up texts of decolonial and Black emancipatory theory, eco-feminist approaches, environmental justice and historical and current examples of human-plant comradeship in resistance struggles connected to the curatorial frame and research interests for the exhibition.

BIOGRAPHIES:

MILENA BONILA (b. Bogotá)is a visual artist, educator and independent researcher, living and working in Amsterdam. She is interested in practices and knowledge that propose and place particular questions about language and agency as ontological properties exclusive to humans, and how this precept is embedded in the way in which economic policies under capitalism operate. This perspective is informed by research on epistemic diversity and its colonial conditioning, as well as by notions on art as medicine. Recent exhibitions  include the Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art BGSW, Slupsk, Poland; CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Framer Framed, Amsterdam, Galeria Municipal do Porto; The School of Impatiences, Normandy; Temporary Gallery, Cologne, and the Museum Miguel Angel Urrutia MAMU, Bogotá, among others. Recent teaching and advisory includes the Oslo Academy of Arts; Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, and WdKA Rotterdam. Milena is currently collaborating with If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part of your Revolution -Amsterdam, in the long term project “Ferals and Ruderals, History from the Cracks”. 
https://milenabonilla.info

YUPANQUI RAMOS (b. 1988 Guanajuato, México) is a multidisciplinary artist and costume designer based in Berlin. Her practice bridges, performance art, installation and video to critically examine colonial dynamics within environmental contexts. Intertwining biotechnology, ancestral knowledge, and more-than-human histories to forge alternative connections between human and non-human worlds. Her work incorporates traditional craft techniques with contemporary artistic forms, Ramos invites to question and reimagine the intricate relationships between culture and nature, interrogating scientific colonialism, ecological disruption, and the extraction of biological resources. Ramos’s work has recently been shown at Hosek Contemporary (2026), 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025), Sophiensæle (2025), SAVVY Contemporary Berlin (2024), Humboldt Forum, Berlin (2024), Thalía Theater (2023),  Kampnagel (2022), Sprechwerk Hamburg (2022), and Beaux-Arts de Paris (2020).

WIRYA BUDAGHI (b. 1979) is a Kurdish-Iranian performance artist and activist who holds a master’s degree from the University of Art, Berlin. After fleeing persecution from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in both Iran and Iraq, he spent time in German refugee camps before establishing his international art career. His powerful performance art uses his own body to challenge state violence, military attacks, and racial exclusion while fighting for human rights and the right to his mother tongue. Through his highly acclaimed work, which has been featured in galleries and festivals across Iraq, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Germany, he creates a shared space for activists and artists to protest oppression and censorship.
https://wiryabudaghi.com

ANGUEZOMO NZE MBA BIKORO (Gabonese-Amazigh) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, lecturer, somatic body therapist, and human rights worker who combines decolonial embodied practices, ancestral healing, and cognitive behavioral therapy to support queer, BiPOC, and migrant communities toward holistic sovereignty and mental health transformation. Their abolitionist methodology employs para- ec(h)ologies, a creative forensic and sonic tool to investigate geologies, marine minerals, and land displacement to document colonial crimes, agricultural warfare, and the systemic murder of Black women in German refugee camps. Through international site-specific collaborations, their projects merge climate justice, herbalism, and sonic topologies of land and ocean to dismantle prejudices and build grass-root emancipatory tools for civic reparation.
www.anguezomo-bikoro.com

muSa MICHELLE MATTIUZZI (b. Sao Paulo) is an undisciplined artist whose research and practice unfold in works that transit through different means of expression, from performance to writing, from photography to films. Colonial violence is a constant theme of muSa’s poetic investigation and her works appropriate and subvert the exotic place attributed to Black women’s bodies by the white-cis-normative imagery narratives, which transform her image into some sort of aberration, an entity split between the wonderful and the abject. muSa is currently interested in Black Radical Thinking and in the study of the works of philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and cultural theorist Fred Moten. She is the founder of the platform Rethinking the Aesthetics of the Colony in partnership with the Goethe Institut São Paulo and The Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) of the University of British Columbia. She was awarded by the Prize Villa Romana and KHI Max Planck in Florence, Italy (2021). And she was invited as a theater director for the CIA Capulanas de Arte Negra with financial support from the 38th Fomento de Artes Cênicas of the City of São Paulo and the Gwälter Foundation (2023).
www.musamattiuzzi.com

ANDREA GOETZKE (b. Germany) works as a curator and cultural organizer. Her recent programme Plant Stories, with Lina Brion at ZK/U Berlin (2025) examined human relations to plants, why they are political, and how they can be different. Andrea’s practice is committed to creating inspiring spaces for people to connect and build community. Her work of the past years has experimented with the cultural space as rehearsal space for emancipatory practice and ways of dealing with established extractive and oppressive structures and relations. With a part of her work dedicated to music, she currently organizes Knistern, a series for sound and conversation, and organizes the community programme of Music Pool Berlin, after organizing a music festival for many years. Andrea has a background in both digital culture and ecology.
https://linktr.ee/andrea.goetzke

With friendly support by:

atb# 122 Susi Rogenhofer | Thomas Bratzke & Anna-Lena Wenzel

An die Arbeit!
Opening: Friday, June 5, 2026, from 7:00 PM;
Concert: Sweet Susie & Manni Montana, 9:00 PM

Exhibition: June 6, 2026 – July 5, 2026
Curated by: Ina Wudtke; film program curated by: Ulrike Jordan

Open by appointment:

Opening:
Friday, June 5, 2026, from 7:00 PM; Concert: Sweet Susie & Manni Montana

Film Screenings:
Saturday, June 20 at 7:00 PM Es kommt darauf an, sie zu verändern, Claudia von Alemann, BRD 1972/73, 54 min. OmeU
Friday, July 3, 2026, at 7 PM Ekmek parası – Geld fürs Brot, Serap Berrakkarasu, BRD 1994, 102 min. OmeU

Finissage (Closing Event):
Sunday, July 5, 2026, 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM Time capsule burial


Work is taking place around the clock in a wide variety of locations. But who are the people performing the labor that the machinery of capitalism needs to keep running? The exhibition An die Arbeit! (Work it!) creates a visual dialogue between the works of Vienna-based artist Susi Rogenhofer (aka Sweet Susie) and Lichtenberg-born artist Thomas Bratzke, who—together with cultural scientist Anna-Lena Wenzel—will create a participatory collage of voices and drawings for the show.

Susi Rogenhofer’s audio-visual series United Workers puts workers in the spotlight, making them visible and audible while showing them in all their human complexity. Since 2021, in collaboration with musician Manni Montana, Rogenhofer has been using cameras and audio recorders to explore worlds of production and labor in various countries—such as Austria, Mexico, and Namibia—and now also Berlin Lichtenberg. At the opening on Friday, June 5th, starting at 7:00 PM, Sweet Susie and Manni Montana will give a live presentation of  a 21st-century workers’ music.

While researching the collection of the German Historical Museum, Thomas Bratzke came across a time capsule titled Treasure Chest for the Year 2000. As it turned out, former classmates had produced photos, letters, and drawings as part of a school assignment around 1989 at the 19th POS “Robert Uhrig” (today’s Schule am Tierpark). These items were stored in a chest and buried on the school grounds. Bratzke, who had moved to the West with his family and was therefore not involved in the original time capsule, now wants to repeat this experiment. He is inviting his former classmates, as well as young people currently attending school in Lichtenberg, to collaborate on Treasure Chest of Work – A Time Capsule for the Year 2050. In doing so, he and Anna-Lena Wenzel are exploring the following questions: How has the understanding of “work” changed since the “pioneer assignments” gathered in the original treasure chest? Bratzke and Wenzel will transform the collected and newly created visual and textual material into a wall piece, which will then be buried in a time capsule on the “after the butcher” premises.

An accompanying film program will examine female and migrant labor from a historical perspective.

Susi Rogenhofer (aka Sweet Susie, born 1971 in Vienna) combines art and music in her practice. Using film as a medium, her stagings, performances, and installations—primarily set in public spaces and realized for platforms such as the Wiener Festwochen—negotiate social and ecological questions. In her work, she provides insights into various lived realities, such as those of workers, making them visible and audible to create a public presence for those underrepresented in the existing order. Her previous experience as a club operator at Vienna’s Flex (1995–2007) and as an internationally active DJ and electronic musician continues to influence her artistic practice today.

Manni Montana (Manfred Schmeczka, born 1968 in Vienna)
Electronic musician and social worker Manni Montana began his career in the 1980s as a bassist in post-punk and industrial rock bands, before turning to electronic music in the 1990s. With the duo BASK and later as a solo artist, he released internationally successful records on Dope Noir Records. In 2010, he founded the project CONTACT with Sweet Susie and worked with Franz Hautzinger, amongst others. Today, he devotes himself to new sound experiments in projects such as United Workers.

Thomas Bratzke (aka ZASD, born 1977 in Berlin)
is a sculptor who has worked since the early 2000s with an expanded definition of sculpture that incorporates space, bodies, signs, and social processes. In his films and installations, Bratzke processes autobiographical experiences from his childhood in the GDR.

Anna-Lena Wenzel (born 1980 in Hamburg)
is a writer and artist. She writes mainly about art and for artists, preferably in the form of interviews (including for the ifa-Galerie and the nGbK). In 2022/23, as part of the exhibition Klassenfragen – Kunst und ihre Produktionsbedingungen (Class Issues – Art and its Conditions of Production) at the Berlinische Galerie, she engaged intensively with the working conditions of cultural practitioners. From 2019 to 2025, she was co-director of the project space Kleiner Raum für aktuelles Nichts in Kreuzberg.

With friendly support by:



#121 Heidrun Holzfeind & Elke Marhöfer

STOP THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST ART AND NATURE

Opening: 17 April 2026, from 7 pm

From 9:30 pm: music by Martin Ebner

Exhibition: 18 April 2026 – 31 May 2026

Finissage: 31 May 2026, from 3-6 pm

6-8 pm listening session: Frauke Boggasch will play tracks from her collection of Japanese noise music.

Open by appointment: 0178 3298106 or 

Longtime friends Elke Marhöfer and Heidrun Holzfeind explore the transformative potential of social and ecological realities, whether through nonhuman actors such as animals, plants and objects, or through people and the urban and architectural environments they inhabit.

The latest body of work by Elke Marhöfer emerges from an engagement with animistic pottery. Two interconnected series are presented in the exhibition. from 7pm to 4am brings together a range of nocturnal protagonists—figures that inhabit her garden during these hours, occupying a threshold between observation and imagination. witch marks engages with apotropaic symbols historically used to ward off misfortune. These include eye motifs that operate as protective signs while evoking a symbolic and material continuity with vernacular traditions.

Objects may possess a functional use and still exist as contemporary art—a cup or a bowl, for instance. Utility does not preclude their status as art; rather, such objects can be understood as experimental articulations of the virtual, or of aisthesis, in relation to one’s lived environment. These dimensions are not mutually exclusive. Yet Western modernity has historically imposed an ontological divide, maintaining a distinction between fine art and applied art.

Heidrun Holzfeind presents hervideo installation the time is now. (2019) which consists of two films with the Japanese shamanic improvisation duo IRO (Shizuko and Toshio Orimo). For the couple, their musical experimentation goes hand in hand with their activist involvement in the peace and anti-nuclear movement and a free-spirited way of life. They espouse an animist and pantheist worldview and vehemently oppose commercialism in all its forms. Holzfeind interlaces their music and philosophy with the ideas set in stone in Takamasa Yosizaka’s Inter-University Seminar House (1965) in Hachioji, Tokyo. 

The question of how architecture works in everyday life and as a social space has long been a central concern in Heidrun Holzfeind’s works. They examine alternative ways of life outside of capitalist society, strategies of resistance and the potential for social change in everyday life. 

Save the date: Ikebana workshop with Natalie Noti, May 9, 2:30-5 pm
To register, please contact  or insta @flowersandmoods; more detailed info will follow.


http://www.heidrunholzfeind.com     
https://elkemarhoefer.xyz/

The exhibition is organized by: Katarina Šević and Gergely László

atb#120. ATB4ever – Practices of Solidarity

anniversary exhibition! 

Finissage: Sunday, 12 April, 3-6 p.m.

Until than open only by appointment: 01783298106 or 

For 20 years, ATB has developed artistic practice in the social sphere – for solidarity, debate, publicity and independence.

To mark this anniversary, we are bringing together companions, accomplices and future allies:

Over 200 artists are participating with fantastic works of art – almost all of which are solidarity contributions.

Come along, celebrate with us – and support our artistic and political work.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to all artists involved for their generosity and trust:

Endre Aalrust, Mohamed Abdulla, Tanya V. Abelson, Erfan Aboutalabi, Lena-Elise Aicher, Efe Aksu, Heather Allen, Ulf Aminde, Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Michel Aniol, Benjamin Badock, Michael Baers, Jamila Barakat, Thomas Bayrle, Göksu Baysal, Oliver Belling, Anastasiia Belousova & Nico Dasenbrock, Elisa T. Bertuzzo, Charlotte Besuijen, Wolfgang Betke, Michael Beutler, J.R. Blank, Frauke Boggasch, Angela Bonadies, Charlotte Bonjour, Shannon Bool, Elfe Brandenburger, Axel Brandt, Ulu Braun, Wolfgang Breuer, Peter Bux, Suna Choi, Ezra Æ. Church, Costantino Ciervo, Clegg & Guttman, Paul Coldwell, Daniela Comani, Alice Creischer, Sambaran Das, Chto Delat, Winfried Demhartner, Jean-Ulrick Desert, Almut Determeyer, Stephan Dillemuth, Discoteca Flaming Star, Dogan Dogan, Antje Dorn, Eva Durovec, Jutta Eberhard, Martin Ebner, Maria Eichhorn, Michaela Eichwald, Pia Leon Eikaas, Lukas Einsele, Robert Estermann, Katja Eydel, Nadine Fecht, Gard Frantzsen, Heiner Franzen, Doris Frohnapfel, Else Gabriel, Geoffrey Garrison, Florian Gass, Stephan Geene, Axel Gerber, Ingo Gerken, Surya Suran Gied, Gregor Gleiwitz, Jeremy Glogan, Erik Göngrich, Undine Goldberg, Asta Gröting, Stefan Gugerel, Florian Haas, Rosa Lena Händle, Kim Hankyul, Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth, Alex Hamilton, Sebastian Hammwöhner, Tang Han, Lise Harlev, Eva Haule, Jochem Hendricks, Philipp Hennevogl, Cornelia Herfurtner, Friedrich Herz, Heidrun Holzfeind, Andy Hope 1930, Laura Horelli, Sonja Hornung & Daniele Tognozzi, Florian Hüttner, Franziska Hufnagel, Dominique Hurth, HUSS WEISE, Stephan Janitzky, Maarten Janssen, Anet Jünger, Anne Kaminsky, Wendelin Kammermeier, Johanna & Helmut Kandl, Heiko Karn, Katharina Karrenberg, Annette Kierulf, Caroline Kierulf, Thomas Kilpper, Hyon-Soo Kim, Gisela Kleinlein, Barbara Klinker, Franziska Kneidl, Karen Koltermann, Caroline Krause, Till Krause, Solon Krieger, Petra Kübert, Luis Kürschner, Thomas Lang, Gergely László, Birgit auf der Lauer, Laurie Lax, Julia Lazarus, Ines Lechleitner, Niina Lechtonen-Braun, Jens Lehmann, Leon Locher, Thomas Locher, Malte Lochstedt, Romain Loeser, Victoria Lomasko, Britta Lumer, Flo Maak, Haure Madjid, Lee Maelzer, Katrin von Maltzahn, Rita Marhaug, Maslowski/Grenzhaeuser, Corinna Mayer, Hans-Jörg Mayer, Jonathan McLeod, Eric Meier, Eva Christina Meier, Michaela Melian, Helmut Menzl, Lilly Merck, Yves Mettler, Karolin Meunier, Jöran Möller, Jörg Möller, Stephan Mörsch, Eduardo Molinari, Tobias Morawski in Kollaboration mit ANPU VARKEY und TFTS/RYC, Christina Morhardt, Ariane Müller, Karsten Neumann, Rainer Neumeier, Irina Novarese, Clare O’Connor, Sim Oerthel, Julia Oschatz, Orakel, Elvis Osmanovic, Ottjörg A.C., Ludger Paffrath, Sophie Pape, Caspar Pauli, Stefan Pente, Manfred Pernice, Hans Petri, Pfelder, Ciara Phillips, Susanne Pittroff, titre provisoire (Cathleen Schuster & Marcel Dickhage), Josephine Pryde, Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremic, JP Raether, Ayumi Rahn, Bianca Rampas, Judith Raum, Claudia Reinhardt, Barak Reiser, Gunter Reski , Bernward Reul, Mirja Reuter, Nina Rhode, Jens Risch, Stefan Römer, Judy Ross, Ulla Rossek, Anastasya Ryabova, Yaser Safi, Julia Sand, Giovanna Sarti, Edwin Schäfer, Romana Schmalisch & Robert Schlicht, Martin Schmidl, Dierk Schmidt, Konstanze Schmitt, Christian Schwarzwald, Maya Schweizer, Ulrika Segerberg, Thomas Seidemann, Eva Seufert, Katarina Šević, Setareh Shabazi, Andreas Siekmann, Nelly Siekmann, Sigune Siévi, Dominik Sittig, Sean Snyder, Kathrin Sonntag, Selou Sowe, Carola Spadoni, Sarah Staton, Ernst Markus Stein, Anton Stoianov, Veit Stratmann, Caro Suerkemper, Jan Svenungsson, Rebecco Ann Tess, Mirjam Thomann, Jan Timme, Sophie Trenka-Dalton, Petra Trenkel, Micki Tschur, Julian Turner, Sveinung Unneland, Bernadette Van-Huy, Maria Vedder, Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans, Gabriela Volanti, Raul Walch, Ute Waldhausen, Fritz Laszlo Weber, Klaus Weber, Herbert Wiegand, Philip Wiegard, Klaus Winichner, Norbert Witzgall, Alexander Wolff, Elisabeth Wood, Ina Wudtke, Florian Wüst, Simiao Yu, Simone Zaugg, Günter Zehetner, Joseph Zehrer, Anna Zett, Florian Zeyfang, Xiaopeng Zhou, Christina Zück and others

photography: Ludger Paffrath

atb#119 Vorraum – titre provisoire + Simm Oerthel

Occupy Vorraum!

A conversation with Michael Jäger (author and journalist, co-founder of the weekly newspaper der Freitag)

as part of the finissage for the current exhibition

Sunday, 22 February 2025, from 5 p.m.

Open from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

We invited Michael Jäger to a discussion based on his article on tech fascism and dark enlightenment (see appendix in German) published in the weekly newspaper der Freitag in December 2025. He is a political scientist, publicist and editor of der Freitag since its founding. We would like to talk to him about what interested us in the exhibition Vorraum by titre provisoire (Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage) and Sim Oerthel. We see it as a “dance” between the three figures by Sim and the performers in Cathleen and Marcel’s Los Angeles film, all of whom are, in a sense, performing in political “antechambers” (Vorraum). They illustrate that there is continuity (and no contradiction) between the liberalism of the market economy and the fascism that is currently unfolding. In Sim Oerthel’s work, this dance is performed by deformed and reassembled body parts of mannequins. They are covered with batteries, bottle caps and fascist historical trash. In Cathleen and Marcell’s film, figures from a neoliberal cultural worker precariat “dance” and interact while clinging to the status quo in increasingly overheated global cities and war scenarios. These are choreographies that have something in common, which we could call both paralysis and unleashing… In our discussion, we would like to explore these developments and consider what emancipatory courses of action and practices are available to counter them.

Organised by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann.

Opening: 16 January 2026, from 7 p.m.

Exhibition: 17 January – 23 February 2026

Open by appointment: 0178 3298106 or 

Vorraum 

The term ‘Vorraum’ (anteroom / pre-space / pre-political space) is now being used by political parties. It distinguishes between a society and its political actors. This distinction makes it possible to separate right-wing parties from their followers. In the pre-space, symptoms can be slandered as causes and turned into scapegoats, Nazi symbols can be shown, Horst Wessel songs can be sung, people can be threatened, or forums can be littered with rubbish. But if pre-space means a gradual change in social subjectivity, then the interior of a car on a sunny morning in Los Angeles could also be a pre-space, where people talk about the impossibility that everyone in the world can have a shower each day. From there, we would then have to begin to think of the ‚pre-space’ as an unbroken arc leading to the lipstick traces on the title pages, street slogans and war memorabilia. 

titre provisoire, Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage show their film `A cold case of happiness´ (34 min), Sim Oerthel is showing three fragmentary figures that are related to each other.

Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage work from a research based approach in time-based media, with archives and text/image related. They collaborate as titre provisoire.
Sim Oerthel, born in Nuremberg in 1997, have been living in Vienna since 2020, where they study at the Academy of Fine Arts.
The exhibition is organised by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann.

#118 after the butcher & Any Jackson Chaturanga present: Hablar con la papa en la boca

Opening: 28 November 2025, 6–10pm
with live performances 8:30–10pm

Mustafa Al Zubaidi, Jashua Bustos Chumasero, Tabea Erhart, Ziyi Li,
Eghbal Joudi, Liesl Lindeque, Bubu Mosiashvili, stefan pente, Shiqi Chai,
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ruomeng Huang, Gertrude, Nico Dasenbrock, Moira Meine Fuentes, Nasrin Larijani, Djamila Köckritz,
Pelle Schemmel, Marina Marcomini, Nastja Belousova, Ilona Karácsony, Abdughaffar Tamaa

Once they took it all, everything shall crumble and the sky will fall upon their heads. Until then, we sing, as we configure another reality with our words, and plead that what goes around, comes around.

Fill the potatoes into the cracks in the wall, letting their fruit spread and break it from within.

In the spring of 2025, at a visit to Berlin’s so-called Humboldt Forum, something began. Traveling all the way from the colonially wealthy Hansestadt Bremen and its world-famous art school, a group around Any Jackson Chaturanga encountered unforeseen obstructions they found in their mouths. Struggling to form words under the blockage, suddenly a potato appeared! Hablar con la papa en la bocautters in the gaps between stolen things, in the shadows, in the difficulty of translating. On invitation by after the butcher, the group then lodged in the premises for 10 days in November 2025 to formulate said utterings in print, video and sculpture. A collective effort was met by many subjective hands. Exquisite corps rules to the game came in handy: Sculptures should not exceed 15x15x15 and can be passed around, a map fills the wall but consists of individual linocuts and other traces, a projection streams constantly but each video can be no longer than 1 minute. 


Open by appointment on: +49 178 3298 106 or email: mailto@after-the-butcher.de

atb#117 sliding down the surface of things – Romana Schmalisch & Robert Schlicht

Finissage: November 16, 2025, 3-6 p.m.

Exhibition: 25 October – 16 November 2025

Surfaces, things, movements – sliding down the surface of things tells of the existence at the end of the supply chain and the relationships of a model human being at the heart of global capitalism to the things that surround him – mostly goods that have made their way to him, gathered in containers, across the seven seas and markets.

The exhibition presents the counterpart and continuation of the installation choreography of commodities (2023), which dealt with the question of the visibility or invisibility of global economic conditions and examined the use of metaphors and narratives as their interpretations. 

In addition to the presentation of two video works, the exhibition shows elements of the set design for a future film. In its construction of an artificial yet seemingly natural social reality, the film reflects on the global system of capitalism, behind whose surface the acting subjects seem to disappear.

Open by appointment only. Please call +49 178 3298 106 or email: 

sliding down the surface of things was funded by the Department for Culture and Social Cohesion of the Senate of Berlin.

atb#116 Spielwagen Berlin 1 – Daring to play in East Berlin

The exhibition Spielwagen Berlin 1 – Daring to play in East-Berlin examines the history and legacy of the East Berlin-based collective ‘Spielwagen Berlin 1’, which emerged in the late GDR period as a pioneering force in experimental play and informal education.

The origins of the collective date back to 1979, when the predecessor group and original ‘Spielwagen Berlin Collective’ was founded. Rather than limiting play to playgrounds, the members of the collective saw the whole city as a possible playground. Their work was centered around a repurposed furniture van – the Spielwagen – used to transport materials and tools for mobile play actions across different East Berlin neighborhoods. In 1985, the original group split into two. 

‘Spielwagen Berlin 1’, the focus of this exhibition, continued its activities primarily in Prenzlauer Berg, developing construction-based formats such as the Stadtspiel, in which children collectively built small towns from cardboard and planks and enacted democratic processes in public space. These experimental practices of utopia making took place in the final years of the SED regime, within a still tightly controlled political context. During the period of upheaval and German Reunification, opportunities for institutional reinvention opened up for the group. In early 1990, some members of ‘Spielwagen Berlin 1’ founded ‘Netzwerk Spiel/Kultur Prenzlauer Berg e.V.’ – a still existing embodiment of their political ideals grounded in care, local action, and participatory democracy.

The exhibition examines broader social and political transformations through the lens of Spielwagen Berlin 1’s history; focusing on the context of its foundation, and topics such as “models,” “networks,” “spaces,” and “transformation.” The exhibition aims to show what was possible in a land of limited opportunities through proto-civil society engagement and how skilfully the actors made use of state structures to open up relative freedoms for themselves and their utopia. The exhibition was curated by two researchers of Eastern Bloc playgrounds’ and Spielwagens’ history: cultural worker Virág Bogyó and historian Florian Manthey. A lot of meticulously compiled original material from private archives is shown publicly for the first time. Interviews conducted with contemporary witnesses from ‘Spielwagen Berlin 1’ form part of the exhibition. 

The accompanying programme for the exhibition is the workshop ‘Utopian neighbourhood stories for a puppet theatre stage’ for children and young people by artists and art educators Mirja Reuter and Florian Gass.

The exhibition was kindly supported by the Robert Havemann Society. The research was supported by the European Union’s Culture Moves Europe program and the Hungarian Eötvös State Scholarship. Virág Bogyó and Florian Manthey would like to thank all the contemporary witnesses who contributed to the exhibition with their stories and by allowing access to their archives. Special thanks to:

Thea BLANK, Jemima FOXTROT, Tibor HORVÁTH, Annika HÖGNER, Nilson KIRCHNER †, Volker SCHUBERT, Meta SELL, Martyn SORGE, Bernd STUDE, Zoltán SZMOLKA, Sabine TESKE, Elbe TRAKAL, Mike WEIMANN, Sebastian ZILM, Netzwerk Spiel/Kultur Prenzlauer Berg e.V., Robert Havemann Society and Spielkultur-Buch e.V.

Photo-Documentation: Ludger Paffrath, Berlin

atb#115 Interspace Collective

Second Thoughts

Interspace Collective is: Jamila Barakat, Momo Bera, Lena Cicek, Frank Jimin Hopp, Minh Kha Le, Mengna Tan, Laura Suryani Thedja, Alungoo Xatan 

exhibition opening on Friday, 01.08.25, from 5 p.m.

Live Performances from 6:30 pm

The exhibition Second Thoughts brings together eight artistic positions from the second generation of migrants in Germany. Through sculpture, video, installation, mixed media, painting, and performance, the works address experiences between origin and expectation, alienation and longing, resistance and self-location. At the core of the exhibition are transgenerational trauma, feminist and anti-racist struggles, questions of transnational adoption, cultural appropriation, and identity in a postmigrant society. 

Throughout the exhibition, the artists will be on hand to supervise and engage in conversation, exchange and spontaneous guided tours. 

Exhibition: 1 August – 31 August 2025   

Opening hours  Thu + Fri: 3–7 p.m.  Sat + Sun: 12–4 p.m.

Contact: +49 176 82 22 44 94

Funded by the Lichtenberg District Office of Berlin from the District Culture Fund.

#114 Victoria Lomasko & Lena Rosa Händle

Opening: Friday 13 June from 7pm

Finissage: Sunday 20 July, from 3-6 pm

with artist talk between Lena Rosa Händle and Victoria Lomasko, moderated by Ingo Arend, from 4-5 pm.

after the butcher, exhibition space for contemporary art and social issues, is pleased to present Lena Rosa Händle and Victoria Lomasko, two artists whose work is dedicated to societal issues such as social equality and justice from a feminist-emancipatory perspective. 

In her project Linked Arms and Striding with Joyful Strength, Lena Rosa Händle shows photographic portraits of feminist groups from the 1980s in East and West Berlin. She combines these with texts by the women portrayed. Händle embarks on a search for traces with her protagonists in order to artistically capture their actions and group images in re-stagings and thus make them tangible in a new way. 

Often invisible lesbian, queer and feminist stories take centre stage – as do women from older generations who have often been socially and politically active for decades and are still active in various feminist contexts today. 

The exploration encompasses the question of how we relate to each other, how we establish and live relationships, both with each other and between the artist, her ‘eye’, the camera and her protagonists. Creating and depicting relationships by means of two classic photographic subjects: the group portrait and the (extended) family portrait. The feminists are not ‘only’ given a face in the process of being photographed – the portrait also creates a space in which the people portrayed speak with their voice: through their texts, which could become part of the work.

Victoria Lomasko is showing a cycle of her new reportage drawings, created in public space, of daily encounters and experiences in the ‘Western’ society and its people that is new to her.

Lomasko is a Russian artist working with social and political issues at the intersection of art, journalism, and sociology, using a synthesis of text and images. Her three graphic books Forbidden ArtOther Russias and The Last Soviet Artist, published in several languages including German, are a chronicle of two decades of Russia’s transformation from a liberal though capitalistic country into a totalitarian state. With a liner and sketchbook, she followed and recorded numerous protest demonstrations on Moscow’s streets, as well as political court cases, such as the one against members of the feminist and activist artist group Pussy Riot in Moscow in 2012.

Since 2022 Lomasko lives in exile mainly in Berlin, where she continues to research contemporary life and different local communities of our society. She uses her pencils to register, observe and report on social contradictions and injustice as a kind of seismographic recorder. With both her pen and her sketchbook she is an active member in the public sphere, e.g. at documenta fifteen and other exhibitions, rallies and demonstrations, both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian, queer-feminist parades, Women’s Day on March 8, and Labour Day on May 1, among others. “I want to analyse and document the contemporary ‘western’ life and society from my post-Soviet perspective”, Lomasko said. 

Note:

Discussion event Linked Arms and Striding with Joyful Strength

with Lena Rosa Händle, Roswitha Baumeister and Sarah Happersberger (moderation)

Sunday 15 June 2025 4 pm

How and under what conditions did feminist groups form in East and West Berlin in the 1980s? What images are conveyed by them – now and then? In a discussion moderated by Sarah Happersberger, the work of Lena Rosa Händle will be used to address questions of lesbian and feminist visibility, self-image, alliance politics, group images, memory culture and intergenerationality.

Ausstellungsraum für zeitgenössische Kunst und soziale Fragen

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