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

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

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

Exhibition
March 24 – August 31, 2023
Opening March 23, 6 – 10 p.m.

Tieranatomisches Theater
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Campus Nord, Haus 3
Philippstr. 13
10115 Berlin

For a thousand years, Chinese girls had their feet bound to keep them as small as possible. Europeans looked at this ideal of beauty with a mixture of fascination and astonishment. In the 19th century, doctors also became interested in the so-called “lotus feet“. Many such specimens can still be found in scientific collections today.

The exhibition shows these sensitive things against the background of social, colonial and medical history. It examines foot-binding as a situated practice that not only restricted women but also had an identity-forming effect. One focus is on the interplay of self-perceptions and foreign perceptions and the intertwining of Chinese and European emancipation movements: Parallel to the initiatives for “foot liberation”, women in Europe fought against the corset. The exhibition gives women a voice.

Further information about the exhibition can be found on the TAT website.

An exhibition of painting students of weißensee kunsthochschule berlin under the direction of Prof. Pia Linz and Petra Trenkel. Curated by the Kleine Humboldt Galerie.

Runtime: 10.09.2022 bis 01.01.2023
Location: ZAK – Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst auf der Zitadelle Spandau

The big city has long been considered a center of the avant-garde and a constant source of inspiration for artists. Its appeal is fed by extremes: Berlin as the epitome of coolness, recklessness and freedom. Living in a big city offers distraction and full days. However, the impressiveness of Berlin’s size and speed can also cause instability or insecurity. In addition to its sheer size, Berlin stands out for its diversity, expressed in its many smaller city centers, diverse population, and never-ending streets.

For one semester, students in Prof. Pia Linz’s and Petra Trenkel’s group at the Weissensee School of Art intensively explored precisely this multifaceted richness of the big city. Through excursions and guest lectures, they sharpened their view of the city and reflected the impressions and observations gained in their works. The resulting group exhibition at ZAK – Center for Contemporary Art was curated by the student initiative Kleine Humboldt Galerie.

The exhibition BIG CITY BABY now brings the big city into the small city, the Zitadelle in Spandau. In the sensitive interplay of the works, one experiences the city through the eyes of the young Berlin artists. Visual reflections on urban life grow here in various disciplines, are linked with other thematic areas and sometimes exaggerated to the point of absurdity. Thus, not only formal experiments are realized in the works, but also a wide range of themes – some of them autobiographically tinged – are touched upon and examined: Youthfulness in the city; the metropolitan area as an excessive demand as well as a place of retreat; the city as a home for the (self-chosen) family; exploration of urban nature and vacancy, et cetera.

The slogan-like title BIG CITY BABY offers space for the multitude of positions of this exhibition. It has no fixed meaning and yet everyone knows what is meant. It is not a quotation, but one nevertheless thinks to have heard it somewhere before. From a passing convertible on the Kudamm or at night on the subway track. BIG CITYBABY is a shout, a whisper, a vibe. You understand it, or you don’t. You can’t escape BIG CITY BABY, just like you can’t escape the big city.

Further information and supporting programme
KLEINE HUMBOLDT GALERIE
BIG CITY BABY