Participating artists:Filipa César · Azin Feizabadi · Sophie Hamacher · Moritz Hirsch · Ayana V. Jackson · Ezgi Kılınçaslan · Thomas Koester · Ines Schaber ·
Sylvia Schedelbauer · Alexandra Spiegel · Jorinde Voigt · Ute Waldhausen
Period (opening hours):2-6 p.m.
Venue:Linienstraße 23, 10178 Berlin
Katharina Sieverding - a master student of Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, with a globally recognised artistic oeuvre - led the Visual Culture Studies class at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1992 to 2010. Her large-format photographic works and projections have been a seismograph of social transformations for more than five decades. The class that shaped them was, in the words of long-time guest lecturer Madeleine Bernstorff, "always also a special spaceship": a collective discourse space in which collaborative work and political, (self-)critical debate took precedence over isolated studio practice. The artistic expressions of the students carry the DNA of this class - its questions, its media and its political alertness - into the present day.
VCS @ Suite, Berlin 2026 reassembles some of the positions and explores this continuity. After VCS @ Kranhalle Oberhausen 2017, VCS @ Suite, Berlin 2026 is the first show in Berlin in a planned series of exhibitions that will make this tradition of politicised artistic practice visible in the present. Berlin has a long habit of opening up empty spaces at short notice and making content accessible that is waiting for its time elsewhere.
The exhibition utilises the time window of this year's Gallery Weekend: twelve international artists from different years are showing new and existing works in a flat in Berlin-Mitte, directly behind the Volksbühne.
The constellation on display does not follow a narrow curatorial narrative, but emerges from the self-organised process of an environment and network, with the common starting point being an expanded concept of art that has been developed since the 1990s in the international discourse of visual culture studies: a visual and art science that understands theoretical reflection and contemporary debate as inseparable. The typical fields of interest of visual culture studies - postcolonial theories and visuality, gender issues, documentary gestures, subculture-related themes and metatheoretical questions of social theory - are specifically reflected in each of the international artistic positions.
Walking through the rooms, a collage-like network of associations emerges: photographs, films, projections, drawings and installations constantly enter into new relationships with one another. The term suite, which is anchored in the exhibition title, refers on the one hand to the architectural framework and on the other to the musical form in which independent movements come together to form a whole without relinquishing their autonomy. Michel Foucault's concept of the archive as a "play of relationships" and a "system of discursivity" perhaps describes this logic most accurately.
