The exhibition unfolds as an immersive rite of passage – an initiation rather than a narrative. Visitors move through a sequence of thresholds – from mouth to darkness, from games to oracle, from rhythm to gaze – revealing how bodies, affects, and technologies are drawn into systems that observe in return.
At the entrance, a large-scale print depicting two mouths meeting denotes not a prelude but an action: a tongue entering another’s mouth evokes speech, intimacy and power, exchange as much as invasion. Stepping into the exhibition becomes a passage through a body, a skin, a system; inside and outside, observers and the observed begin to blur.
From the obscurity of the first space, children’s voices prompt the rehearsed reply ‘no one’; fear manifests not as a personal emotion, but as a collective discipline, an emotional regime. Childhood is where early imprints take hold, where responses, roles and responsibilities are imposed before a person can speak for themselves.
In the second space, the children’s fortune-telling game ‘chatterbox’, known in German as Himmel & Hölle (‘heaven and hell’) is infiltrated by AI-generated statements. What starts out as a game becomes a reflection of algorithmic authority.
Knowledge is no longer neutral; it is programmed and guided by interests—a prophetic authority that predicts a future already laid out. Simultaneously, fairy-tale images, urban traces, and script projected onto parchment leather appear as inscriptions of stigma, shame, and attribution; the space reads like a marked body.
The journey culminates in the figure of a conductor, whose gestures structure an inaudible rhythm and redirect attention back to the audience. Here, ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ appear as states of visibility, control and vulnerability. The exhibition claims no external standpoint, instead, it reveals how it guides the viewer’s gaze. Queerness operates in the space of the in-between, shifting binary orders and rendering the exhibition space legible as an apparatus in which fear, trust and control are negotiated through the body – without reassuring resolution, leaving a question suspended in the room.
Extended until 23 May 2026
Wed–Fri 12:00-17:00, Sat 11:00-15:00
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