Category Archives: Exhibition

Chair Theory and Practice of Curating, Event, Exhibition, News, Opening, Theorie und Praxis des interdisziplinären Kuratierens

Exhibition opening, October 2, 2025: “Family Matters” at the Humboldt Forum

Family Matters

Father, mother, child? Surprising perspectives on the traditional family model in the past and present.

Family: (Nearly) everyone has a family, and yet every family is different! But what’s the stitching that keeps families together? And who’s really responsible for spinning it? In a year-long programme, the Humboldt Forum is exploring the stuff that family ties are made of. Are they full of holes or tightly woven; do they hang on a thread, or are they patchwork or perhaps macramé?

It is all about networks of relationships – from artistic, historical, scientific, and international perspectives, and in dialogue with the people of Berlin.

Explore what and who family and family relations can encompass, and the broad variety of ways in which living together is experienced. Everyone involved with the project at the Humboldt Forum is collectively looking at the theme of family relations in the present, past, and future, in a variety of formats including exhibitions, performances, discussions, workshops, guided tours, and interventions throughout the museum.

Exhibitions and Interventions

A special feature of this exhibition is that it takes in all the galleries and collections at the Humboldt Forum. The theme is introduced by ten hubs – some of which are interactive – in the Family Matters area on the ground floor, ranging from personal family constellations to a VR community around the table and individual stories about pet names, taking us from global family history, conflicts, and compromises to very personal watershed moments. Here you can question and expand your own ideas about and understanding of what family is!

More than forty selected objects from the Ethnologisches Museum (Ethnological Museum) and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Asian Art Museum), from Berlin’s historical royal palace, the Humboldt Labor, and BERLIN GLOBAL, along with Museum Knoblauchhaus, will become a part of this year-long programme, showing how power relations intervene in family biographies. And also how personal family narratives can originate larger stories of power or even religions.

Temporary exhibitions look at the preservation of endangered languages from all over the world and the transgenerational dissemination of knowledge. We also present contemporary positions by international artists, exploring the family realities of queer and migrant experience.

Events

Numerous events for adults and children offer new perspectives on the theme of family. This year’s Transkontinentale festival will bring family stories from Africa, South America, and Asia to Berlin, as well as the European premiere of the Namibian German music theatre People of Song. Things are going to get particularly lively at the end of October, when the Dia de Muertos celebration of family will be held for the second time at the Humboldt Forum. This is something to look forward to, but please note that there is also a full events programme on the opening days of the exhibition, with our first themed days in October.

Care or Chaos? Themed Days, 3–5 October

On three consecutive themed days immediately after the exhibition opens, the Humboldt Forum will focus on care, nursing, and family relations. Small gestures, each with a big effect – artistic interventions, performances, readings, and conversations will facilitate a rethinking of family: in the workshop “In the Dreamhouse,” in dance interventions in the permanent exhibition, in a kitchen buffet with medicinal flowers, and with African Street Games for the whole family. The days will feature author and musician Christiane Rösinger, the Resident Music Collective, feminist author Sophie Lewis, and a showing of the film In Prinzip Familie by director Daniel Abma, and much more.

In the museum’s workshops there will be hands-on drop-ins where participants can test out and make their own creations, while the Picture Book Cinema will present fascinating stories on the big screen, read by well-known personalities with musical accompaniment.

Two further themed days are planned for 2026: “Family Secrets” and “Together Against Resistance: Alternative Forms of Living with Each Other.”

The exhibition opens on October 2nd at 6 p.m. – free admission.
Foyer, special exhibition areas and other areas on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd floors

Opening program: 

6pm

Welcome:

Hartmut Dorgerloh, General Director of the Humboldt Forum
Julia von Blumenthal, President of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Sophie Plagemann, Artistic Director and Board Member of the Stadtmuseum Berlin Foundation
Lars-Christian Koch, Director of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, National Museums in Berlin

Greeting:

Konrad Schmidt-Werthern, Head of Office at the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media

Introductory remarks:

Laura Goldenbaum, Solvej Helweg-Ovesen, Grit Keller, Alia Rayyan, Maria Sobotka, and others

7pm
Short guided tours of the exhibition interventions

7:30pm
Discussion rounds in the foyer

8:30pm
Music set by the Resident Music Collective from their new programme Sonic Affinities

9pm
DJ set: Stella Zekri

The program and the exhibition have been jointly curated by all the stakeholders involved at the Humboldt Forum: Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss (SHF), Ethnologisches Museum and Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Overall curatorial directorship: Dr. Laura Goldenbaum (SHF).

Location: All floors of the Humboldt Forum and at the Stadtmuseum/Museum Knoblauchhaus 

Duration: Fri, October 3, 2025 – Sun, July 12, 2026

Opening hours: Mon, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun: 10:30 a.m. – 6:30 p.m.; Tue: Closed

New ticket prices from 3 October 2025, further information under Admission & Tickets

Reduced admission applies during the themed weekend from 3 to 5 October.

Photo credit: Stiftung Humboldt Forum at the Berliner Schloss, Photo: Getty Images, The Image Bank, Karan Kapoor

Event, Exhibition, Opening

IN BETWEEN I FELT IT ALL – Group Show Kleine Humboldt Galerie

06.07.2025 -13.07.2025 ZK/U (Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik)

Kumo Taro, Jelena Fužinato, Lisa Hoffmann, Jamila Barakat, Brennan Wojtyła, Gala Lillian, Érin Périès, Nogan Camille Chevreau Halima Aziz, Katie Kelly, Hybrid Project Space

an exhibition by Kleine Humboldt Galerie

The student-run and volunteer-based Kleine Humboldt Galerie presents a group exhibition featuring eight artistic positions, accompanied by a range of mediation formats.

In between I felt it all explores spaces and conditions of the “in between” – transitions that are difficult to grasp. As members of society, we move through private, public, and shared spaces every day. But where do those places begin that feel in between? On emotional and identity levels, too, we navigate fields of tension that create states of ambiguity. The “in between” is paradoxical and ambivalent – which is precisely why it calls for artistic engagement.

The exhibited works approach this theme in diverse, interconnected ways: as architectural fragments, as queer and/or diasporic identities, or as subtle shifts between visibility and invisibility. Through installation, photography, painting, and performance, the artists open up urban in-between spaces, question social norms, and offer personal insights.

Mediation formats build bridges between artworks and audiences. They invite participation, contextualization, and critical engagement. Questions of identity and political belonging are not just presented, but actively negotiated – creating space for reflection, new perspectives, and critical inquiry.

Vernissage: 5. July 2025, 6pm

When: 6.-13. July 2025

Where: ZK/U (Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik), Siemensstraße 27, 10551 Berlin

Program

July 5th: 6pm – 12am: Vernissage

July 6th: 6pm – 8pm: going through, or armstand with overback – part I 
A performance by Nogan Camille Chevreau *

July 10th: 8pm: out of frame – Between Film and Conversation x Unscharfer Filmtreff

July 12th: 12pm – 9pm: Festival Day

  • 12 – 1pm & 1 – 2pm: moving in between – Dance and movement workshop with Katie Kelly *

  • 1 – 3pm: finding words in between – Collaborative writing on queer perspectives

  • 3 – 6pm: *Halima’s Tatreez Workshop

  • 7pm: Artist Talk with Gala Lillian and Jamila Barakat

July 13th: 2pm – 9pm:

  • 2pm: Curator’s Tour

  • 4pm: spilling tea – A coffee gathering on the exhibition *

  • 7pm: going through, or armstand with overback – part II
    A performance piece by Nogan Camille Chevreau *

    * Registration required via email: kleinehumboldtgalerie@hu-berlin.de 

IN BETWEEN I FELT IT ALL - Poster
IN BETWEEN I FELT IT ALL
Event, Exhibition

Muddy Measures: When Wetlands and Heritage Converse

inherit. heritage in transformation 

Venue: TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater

Exhibition: March 28 – July 19, 2025. 

Events: March 29 – June 12, 2025.

Wetlands emerge where water encounters land. Activists recording endangered migratory bird sounds in mudflats, people dancing bare feet in wetlands, soil scientists sticking tools in the peat, farmers draining peatlands for agriculture, artists putting their hands in marshes.

muddy measures. when wetlands and heritage converse experiments with wetlands becoming spaces for debate and engagement inviting people with their situated knowledges, to learn from one another. It welcomes audiences to exhibitions and events, and asks: How can a heritage perspective can reshape our understanding of wetlands? Conversely, how does engaging with wetlands in transformation alter our understanding of heritage? How are wetlands measured and what counts as measurement? What and who falls out of the grid?

The muddy measures exhibition at the Tieranatomisches Theater opened on 27 March 2025 at 18:00. The exhibition features materials from the Humboldt Universit’s collection Moorarchiv, as well as the Land Prints series of Teresa Pereda, and documentations from the Saemangeum Citizen Ecological Investigation Group.

Monthly changing guest exhibitions which feature Berlin-based research projects form an integral part of muddy measures. It will include “If you take care of birds, you take care of most of the environmental problems in the world” from June 12 – July 19 by anthropologist and HZK Member Magdalena Buchczyk (Institute of European Ethnology), as well as “Swamp Things!” from March 27 – April 30 and “Latent Accumulations” May 10 – May 31, developed with project partners.

There will also be several events including the workshop “Listening to the Mallín” with the artist Teresa Pereda (29 March), the workshop “MoorFit” with the artist Daniel Hengst (25 April, Häsener Luch), the roundtable event of Latent Accumulations (9 May) and workshop by artist-researcher Alice Jarry (10 May), and the film screening of “Sura. A Love Song” by Hwang Yun (12 June, Kino Central).

Find more information and registration here: https://inherit.hu-berlin.de/events/muddy-measures-when-wetlands-and-heritage-converse

Laurentiu Constantin measuring a soil core sample in Bieselfließ
Laurentiu Constantin measures a soil sample in Bieselfließ, Germany, November 2024

Contributors: Anahí Herrera Cano (CONICET-UBA), Ayelen Fiori (Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco), Charlett Wenig (Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces), Daniel Hengst, Dongpil Oh, Heejung Jung, Seongsil Lee and Seungjun Oh (Saemangeum Citizen Ecological Investigation Group), Doohee Oh (Peace Wind), Eugenia Tomasini, Clara Tomasini and Milagros Córdova (Centro MATERIA IIAC-UNTREF), Yun Hwang, Iva Rešetar (Matters of Activity), Juana del Carmen Aigo (INIBIOMA-CONICET), Jutta Zeitz (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin – HU), Laurentiu Constantin (HU), Léa Perraudin (Matters of Activity), Lucia Braemer (HU), Lucy Norris (Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin), Magdalena Buchczyk (HU), Moorarchiv (HU), Paula Vogt (University of Potsdam), Rosa Blens (HU), Saemangeum Citizen Ecological Investigation Group, and Teresa Pereda.

Curated by Yoonha Kim, Juliana Robles de la Pava, Margareta von Oswald

Project Website – TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater

Logos

Image credit top banner: Teresa Pereda Working on Land Prints Series. ©Teresa Pereda

Discussion, Event, Exhibition

Protecting Trees – Crafting Houses – Parrot Tree Caretakers Association meets Morgenvogel Real Estate

The TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater invites you to an evening of dialogue and presentations on the preservation of bird habitats through activism and visual art. Featuring conservationist and activist Nick Byaba (Parrot Tree Caretakers Association, Uganda) and artist duo Maria Leena Räihälä & Manuel Bonik (Morgenvogel Real Estate, Germany/Finland), the event explores the intersections of interspecies care and the shared agency of birds and humans in urban and rural environments.

Event details
Date: March 25, 2025
Time: 6–8 pm
Location: Tieranatomisches Theater, HU Berlin, Campus Nord, Philipstr. 12/13, 10115 Berlin
Language: English
Admission: Free

With
Nick Byaba (Parrot Tree Caretakers Association), Kampala, Uganda
Maria Leena Räihälä & Manuel Bonik (Morgenvogel Real Estate), Berlin

Moderator: Felix Sattler, TA T

The event is part of the exhibition Hörner/Antlfinger: Parrot Terristories (on view at TA T until March 29) by artists Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger in collaboration with Nick Byaba and CMUK.

While operating in distinct contexts—Uganda’s tropical forests and European urban landscapes—both initiatives reflect a commitment to birds as valued co-inhabitants.

Morgenvogel-Haeuser-Spatzen-Kolonie-Mauerpark-Berlin-Mitte
Morgenvogel houses for a colony of sparrows, commissioned by Grün Berlin, potato hall in the extension area of Mauerpark in Berlin-Mitte, 25 February 2019 © Morgenvogel

Parrot Tree Caretakers Association (PTCA)
Founded in 2020 by Nick Byaba, the PTCA is a community-based organization dedicated to conserving grey parrots and their habitats. Through tree-planting initiatives, educational outreach, and scientific monitoring, the PTCA works with local farmers and conservationists to ensure the survival of this endangered species. Key achievements include planting over 6,000 indigenous trees, monitoring parrot flyways, and integrating rehabilitated parrots back into their original habitats.

The PTCA also runs educational programs for children, fostering a new generation of conservationists who advocate for the protection of parrots and their ecosystems. Looking ahead, the PTCA aims to establish the world’s first Grey Parrot Museum in Uganda, serving as a hub for education, research, and awareness. greyparrotmuseum-uganda.org

The exhibition Hörner/Antlfinger: Parrot Terristories includes the joint work SEEDS by Hörner/Antlfinger and Nick Byaba.

PTCA-Museum-Drawing-by-Ronald-Ajuna
Child’s draft for the Grey Parrot Museum, drawing by Ronald Ajuna. ©PTCA/Ronald Ajuna
PTCA-Rose-Kembabazi-Portrait
Rose Kembabazi, a local farmer, close to her oil palm tree, a proud member of the Parrot Tree Caretakers Association. ©PTCA

Morgenvogel Real Estate
Morgenvogel Real Estate (M0RE) is a long-term artistic initiative by Maria Leena Räihälä and Manuel Bonik, addressing the loss of nesting opportunities for urban birds in the wake of urban redevelopment. For over a decade, the Berlin-based art project Morgenvogel has engaged in ecological urban interventions by producing and distributing handcrafted birdhouses tailored for species like tits, sparrows, and pied flycatchers.

With support from conservation foundations, Morgenvogel has placed over 1,000 nesting boxes across Berlin and other European Cities, often accompanying installations with art events such as BirdChurch, Avanti Natura!, and BirdTalks.

Beyond Morgenvogel Real Estate, Maria Leena Räihälä and Manuel Bonik have been engaged in landscape restoration, most recently by their MAJAVA project (2021–2024), an initiative inspired by beavers as ecosystem engineers (Majava is the Finnish word for beaver). Through dam-building and water filtration structures, Morgenvogel seeks to counteract environmental degradation in Finnish wetland and forest areas. morgenvogel.net

Morgenvogel-Haus-Mauerpark-Starling-Darling
StarlingDarling @ Morgenvogel-House, Mauerpark, 16.05.2020. © Morgenvogel
Image credit top banner: African Grey Parrots taking a meal on oil palm trees. © PTCA
Discussion, Event, Exhibition, News

Parrot Terristories: Rethinking More-than-Human History, Conservation, Care, and Colonial Legacies

The transdisciplinary roundtable, which is part of Hörner/Antlfinger: Parrot Terristories exhibition at TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater, investigates intersections of more-than-human global history, animal agency, conservation, care, and colonial legacies. The panel examines how African grey parrots make culture in freedom—expressing complex social behaviors, cognition, and adaptability—and how captivity disrupts these processes. This commodification of parrots serves as a lens for broader histories of exploitation and the ethical challenges of conservation. The roundtable further explores the role of indigenous knowledge and practices in rethinking conservation and highlights the need to decolonize approaches that reflect interconnected human and nonhuman histories. By critiquing the colonial provenance of natural history collections, the discussion reveals how power dynamics have shaped preservation ethics and interpretation. Linking these perspectives, the roundtable envisions equitable conservation and museum practices that emphasize shared responsibilities across species and cultures.

The event will be held in English.    

Caption: Ölpalme auf Danniel Mbahurire’s Land, Uganda 2022, Foto: HörnerAntlfinger (links); A. Goering, in Carl Hennicke, Der Graupapagei in Freiheit und Gefangenschaft, 1895 (rechts)


When:

Tour of the exhibition with artists Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger: December 12, 2024 at 5 p.m.

Round table: December 12, 2024, at 6  to 8.15 p.m.

Venue: TA T — Tieranatomisches Theater, Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, HU Berlin Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13/Haus 3

Roundtable Discussion at TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater

Participants

Nancy Jacobs, Brown University, Providence, is a historian and author of the book The Global Grey Parrot: The Worldwide History of a Charismatic African Animal https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/global-grey-parrot-worldwide-history-charismatic-african-animalhttps://www.brown.edu/news/2024-02-29/grey-parrots She is very much concerned with animals as historical actors and parrots as political, cultural, and world-making creatures. She is also interested in human efforts to improve life for parrots in captivity and to conserve the birds’ existence in their native forests.

 Katja Kaiser, Museum for Natural History Berlin, Research associate in the project “Guidelines for the handling of natural history collections from colonial contexts”. Katja Kaiser collaborated with Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger on their work “One of Thirtysix” that traces the provenance of single grey parrot specimen from the museum’s collection https://www.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/en/about/team/katja.kaiser

André Krebber, guest fellow in cultural history and theory at LeipzigLab at Leipzig University and adjunct lecturer at the University of Kassel. André’s interested in knowledge cultures and how they shape and are shaped by human-nature relations with a particular focus on the role of nonhuman animals therein to respond to the current environmental crisis. In his forthcoming book The Forgotten Animal, he proposes an aesthetic practice of animal remembrance that makes the recognition of animal self-determination the foundation for overcoming appropriating relations to nature. https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb05/fachgruppen-und-institute/geschichte/lehrgebiet/sozial-und-kulturgeschichte-human-animal-studies/dr-andre-krebber

Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, Lecturer, Culture and Heritage Studies (CHS) at Bindura University, Zimbawe and Research Fellow at inherit. heritage in transformation at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research interests include decolonising heritage conservation practices, African archeology, and museology.

https://inherit.hu-berlin.de/fellows/munyaradzi-elton-sagiya

Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger are professors of multispecies storytelling at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and have been living together in a multispecies household with grey parrots for over 20 years. Their installations, videos and sculptures deal with relationships between humans, animals and machines and open up critical perspectives on changeable social constructs as well as utopian visions of equal interaction. Their communal living with non-human animals is characterised by shared social actions and how these produce a shared space. In 2014, Hörner/Antlfinger founded the interspecies collective CMUK with the grey parrots Clara and Karl, who are also contributing artistic works to the current exhibition.

Felix Sattler is head and curator of the TA T – Exhibition Research Space at the Centre for Cultural Techniques, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His curatorial strategy aims to foster dialogue between a variety of communities. Felix Sattler’s projects have addressed topics as diverse as the art and design history of unicellular algae, an archaeology of the multiple past, and the postcolonial controversies surrounding museums and human remains.

Contact:

Felix Sattler,  felix.sattler@culture.hu-berlin.de

Discussion, Event, Exhibition, Workshop

Queer Sonic Fingerprint – Transdisciplinary Research – Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz

How do bodies sound? And how can a group of cultural belongings in an ethnological museum collection resonate in unexpected queer kin relations? In their interactive multichannel sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint, sound artist Adam Pultz and anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker (Hermann von Helmholtz Zentrum für Kulturtechnik) speculatively imagines non-normative relations around cultural belongings in ethnological museums and beyond. The installation amplifies the collection‘s materiality through sonic fingerprints—that is—the reflections of a body’s acoustic characteristics. In a transdisciplinary encounter with sound processing and evolutionary computing, dynamically changing fingerprints bring selected parts of museum collections to life in a multichannel sonic ecology.

Queerness contains a tension, something which gender and sexuality studies scholar Susan Talburt identifies as a fundamentally productive quality. Cultural belongings in ethnographic collections are things deeply affected by the colonial encounter and its political aftermath. They, too, are caught in a tense state, as current debates about ownership, their history, their representative functions, and proper place come to show. Voices from indigenous communities and scholars have reframed so-called ethnographic “objects” in museum collections as person-like entities. The installation includes those relations that are currently being claimed with increasing insistence, alongside relations between collection items.

The playback of the sonic fingerprints will form part of a multichannel sound installation also involving field recordings and spoken narrative. Here, kinship and relations between objects become sonic relations, contributing a different register to what is traditionally a visual experience. Museum displays and collections are governed by strict rules: most things may not be touched and many things remain inaccessible in storage. In response to such restrictions, the sonic domain can provide access through a different sensory modality. Here, imagining a sonic image of these bodies offers a sensitive way of not looking or touching, not representing or claiming ownership.

Throughout the installation the sonic fingerprints will merge, recombine, and create new generations of virtual fingerprints with their own acoustic properties, evading museal categories and representational claims, just like queer identities and ways of kinning evade normative ideas of gender, relations, and sexuality. Through evolutionary computing and audience interaction, Queer Sonic Fingerprint highlights new object-relations that transcend the logic of the museum as a place of clear-cut display, education and safekeeping. A multisensory and interactive format challenges such established forms of museal practice. Through the speculative sonic-material futures that emerge, non-normative kinship and queer narratives work toward a critique of the ethnographic collection’s colonial roots.

Venue
Art Laboratory Berlin
Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin

Dates and opening hours
Opening: 19 October 2024, 8 pm
Running time: 20 October – 1 December 2024
Fri – Sun, 2 – 6 pm

ALB Team
Tuçe Erel, Christian de Lutz, Regine Rapp, Alice Cannavà, Camila Flores-Fernández

Photo documentation
Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz Melbye

Supported by
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Dansk Komponistforening/ KODA Kultur
Sound Art Lab
The Speculative Sound Synthesis Project

Queer_Sonic_Fingerprint_Transdisciplinary_Research_Poster
Exhibition poster. Copyright: Alice Cannava
Event, Exhibition, News

About grey parrots and humans

The Animal Anatomy Theatre opens the exhibition ‘Parrot Terristories’ on 10 October, focusing on the multifaceted history of grey parrots and humans

African grey parrots are social animals that live in the tropical rainforests of West and Central Africa, where they travel in large flocks. However, these clever birds are endangered in the wild. There are now probably more grey parrots living in human households in Europe, the USA and the Middle East than in the wild.

The research and exhibition project ‘Parrot Terristories’ focuses on the history and complex facets of the relationship between grey parrots and humans. For six years, Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger, Professor of Multispecies Storytelling at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, have been working with numerous actors and institutions to create images, texts, films, sound works and installations that examine and show where parrots and humans meet and what these encounters look like.

Art by grey parrots and humans

Hörner and Antlfinger themselves have lived in a household with grey parrots for 20 years and founded the interspecies collective CMUK – which stands for the first letters of the collective’s four first names – with Karl and Clara in 2014. There is a shared workbench in the studio where installations such as the ‘Dollhouse for Dinosaurs’ are created: A model of their shared home, on whose windows, doors and walls the birds have left their mark. Shredded magazines, cork crumbs and splinters of wood litter the floor and bear witness to the power of the beaks and the desire to mould and shape. An audio recording inside the model gives an idea of the strength and perseverance with which the animals went about their work. The exhibition also includes a joint work with Nick Byaba from the Parrot Tree Caretakers Association in Uganda, which examines the relationship between wild grey parrots and their environment.

The exhibits make this clear: Grey parrots are individuals with their own will and experience, they have agency and actively create and shape their world. Recognising this ‘animal agency’ is the central concern of ‘Parrot Terristories’.

The Tieranatomisches Theater is showing the exhibition in the context of research into material cultural heritage at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik and the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities ‘inherit.heritage in transformation’ at Humboldt University.

Caption: CMUK. Divided workbench in the studio. Photo: Hörner/Antlfinger

Supported by Kunststiftung NRW, Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin and Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln

Further information
Vernissage: 10 October, 7 pm
Location: Tieranatomisches Theater, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13/Haus 3, 10115 Berlin
Exhibition duration: 11 October 2024 to 29 March 2025

Learn more about the exhibition at TA T

Further cooperation partners
Dr. Sylke Frahnert, Dr. Katja Kaiser, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (wissenschaftshistorische Beratung)
Christine Bluard, Annelore Naeckerts, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgien
Prof. Nancy Jacobs, Brown University
Dr. Vanessa Wijngaarden, University of Johannesburg, University of Liège

Contact:
Felix Sattler, Director and Curator of the TA T
felix.sattler@culture.hu-berlin.de

 

Event, Exhibition, News

THEATRE OF MEMORY – A neuro-acoustic sound network by Tim Otto Roth at TAT

In the auditorium of the Tieranatomisches Theater (Veterinary Anatomy Theater), the “Theatre of Memory” forms an extraordinary microtonal ensemble: 70 spherical, colourfully illuminated loudspeakers ‘listen’ to each other and excite or inhibit each other via their characteristic sine tones, analogous to nerve cells.

In the immersive sound laboratory, current neuroscientific research can not only be experienced, but music literally becomes nervous: an entire room is transformed into a network of interacting sounds that reflect the fundamental processes in nerve cells that make us sentient and thinking beings. The walk-in sound space composed of communicating loudspeakers not only makes it possible to immerse yourself in the network structure, but also to interact with it via tones and noises.

Duration of the exhibition: 12 January to 10 March 2024.

Further information about the exhibition can be found on the website of the Tieranatomisches Theater.

Theatre of Memory @ TAT
Theatre of Memory @ TAT – Photo: (c) Tim Otto Roth, imachination projects, 2023
Event, Exhibition

MAREJESHO: The Call for Restitution from the Peoples of Kilimanjaro and Meru

Exhibition MAREJESHO
Tieranatomisches Theater, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13/Haus 3, 10115 Berlin

Opening October 12, 6 p.m.
Exhibition duration: October 13, 2023 – June, 2024

Across Kilimanjaro and Meru in Tanzania, the legacy of resistance against the German colonial rule beats strong in the hearts of descendants. Only many ancestral witnesses and testimonies from that violent time are missing; waiting to be found languishing in German museum depots. In 1900, Colonial Officers publicly hanged leaders of the local communities and shipped dismembered body parts to the Ethnological Museum in Berlin for racist research. This was further compounded by the theft of personal belongings: local symbols of power, weapons, armory and jewellery.

For over 50 years, relatives have been demanding the return of their abducted ancestors. But how to locate them? How to rememorise belongings of cultural heritage that had been far for a century? How to repair from the acts of dismemberment and rupture? What action do the descendants expect from Germany?

In 2022, MAREJESHO (Swahili for return, restitution) travelled to six villages across Kilimanjaro and Meru as a mobile research exhibition. The aim was to exchange multi-sourced knowledge and reduce the gap between German museums and communities. Pictures of misappropriated local cultural heritage and historical photographs were presented and information on collections with ancestral remains was shared. Tanzanian artists accompanied the exhibition with live drawings, filmmakers documented oral histories from the villages. Eventually, as a result of the project, the remains of few missing ancestors in Berlin and New York could be identified.

The Berlin iteration of MAREJESHO at TA T focuses on the questions asked, the knowledge generated and the responses of the communities across Kilimanjaro and Meru. The films and artworks made in Tanzania show the necessity of repatriation and restitution, but also the rich oral histories and the complexity of (post-)colonial relations then and now.

MAREJESHO is a Flinn Works production with Berlin Postkolonial and Old Moshi Cultural Tourism Enterprise in cooperation with bafico and APC in collaboration with Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, Staatliche Ethnographischen Sammlungen Sachsen, Linden Museum Stuttgart and TA T / Humboldt University in Berlin.
Funded by TURN2 fund of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes. Funded by Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien. Further funding by between bridges.

TA T – Website MAREJESHO

Event, Exhibition

Theatrum Radix – Virtual natural order between art and science by Marlene Bart

Tieranatomisches Theater
Opening May 5, 6 p.m.
Exhibition duration: May, 6 – 27, 2023
The virtual reality animation can be experienced via VR headsets every Tuesday to Saturday between 4 – 6 p.m. for the duration of the exhibition.

Is there a natural “order of things?“ To answer this question, humans have created a wide variety of visual systems that promise orientation and security. The virtual reality installation Theatrum Radix conceived by artist Marlene Bart encourages the critical examination of this security in the context of the limits of visual and spatial perception.

Bart transforms the auditorium of the historic Veterinary Anatomy Theatre into a walk-in encyclopaedia, in which glass and plastic objects created by the artist, natural history collection items and their virtual equivalents coexist and form new combinations.

The historical objects on display and their digital copies, which are scans from the CT laboratory of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Mediasphere For Nature, form an essential point of reference. They are narratively expanded and artistically linked by the virtual reality animation.
The installation allows the visitors to immerse themselves in a new, surreal world and order of nature.

Project website

TAT_MB_Theatrum_Radix_Flyer

A cooperation of Tieranatomisches Theater and Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
Artistic director: Marlene Bart
Curator: Felix Sattler (Tieranatomisches Theater) Co-curator: Katharina Otto (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)
Project management: Antonia Willisch (Tieranatomisches Theater)
Partner: Ikonospace (Founder Joris Demnard and 3D designer Manuel Farre), Daniel Benyamin (composer), INVR.SPACE GmbH, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Mediasphere For Nature