17. July, 18:00
Forschungsstation auf dem Lutherplatz

More than ever, we are surrounded by images and texts, commentary bars, video snippets and photographs in the age of AI-supported reproducibility. They comment on current events and personal sensitivities like never before. They document, emotionalise and divide, often enough ‘triggering’ our own “bubble”, as sociologist Steffen Mau puts it, in a society ‘exhausted by change’ and shaken by crises.

Against this backdrop, how can we develop exhibitions that go beyond the rhetoric of announcing, claiming and demanding - and still take a stand? Shouldn't it be about productively thwarting the ongoing mechanisms of polarisation that not only dominate our current social constitution, but have also arrived in the artistic community? In other words: How can we take account of the demand for difference and thus conceive exhibitions that, in the best case, encourage a critical-discursive dialogue between the work and the viewer?

Two exhibition projects will be presented in the lecture, with a good decade between them. One project, Communitas I and II (2011 and 2012), was preceded by the observation of a ‘proliferation of communities’. The rise of ‘communities’ was linked to mechanisms that defined belonging and exclusion. For the exhibition project, this meant giving space to artists whose works emphasised the idea of ‘being with’. The second project, what stands between us (2025), sought to emphasise the idea of ‘understanding from the other’ in the sense of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Here, projects that lent resonance to the other person by means of their own voice were central - not as loudspeakers drowning out everything, but in the reflection on how, beyond the dominant schemes of unification, narratives can (once again?) be differentiated and tender.

On the one hand, both projects attempted to react to the respective social conditions - which testify to a frightening continuity - and, on the other hand, to give space to current artistic strategies that opened up a critical resonance space. Another focal point was an expanded use of the medium of photography.

Maren Lübbke-Tidow is an art historian and works as a freelance author and curator in Berlin. Since 2021, she has been the artistic director of the biennial photo festival EMOP Berlin - European Month of Photography. www.marenluebbketidow.com

Image: Susanne Keichel, Berufsschüler*in I, Duisburg, 2023. From the series: Social Justice Part II - Labour, 2023-24. C-print, 60 x 40 cm.