Location:

nGbK, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 11/13, 10178 Berlin

Contributors:

AG Art Worker Solidarity, Mel Baggs, Casa Kuà, Nino Bulling, Vika Kirchenbauer, Bär Kittelmann, knowbotiq, İz Öztat, Amanda Priebe, Anikẹ Joyce Sadiq, Sickness Affinity Group, Steckenpferde Webserie AG

nGbK working group:

Jyl Franzbecker, Tyan Fritschy, Sonja Hornung, Mizu Sugai, Ülkü Süngün

Property influences both power relations and our capacity for action, permeating how we view ourselves and the world. The modern concept of property emerged in bourgeois Europe as it began its colonial expansion. Since then, it violently differentiates between two modes: the capacity to dispose over land, things, and other people, and the obligation to make one’s own body and its labor available. Property continues to carry forward the scars of this violence.

knotting unruly ties addresses property’s affective power as it is countered by collective forms of resistance. Through an exhibition, a web series, and workshops, the project draws attention to spaces, bodies, and relationships that are intractable to dominant forms of control. The labor conditions of the art field are questioned, while an artist interrogates her own (in)capacity for action in light of her contractual obligations to the state. Past and present moments of enclosure are recorded as they echo in the land and our relationships. Through reconstructing a neighborhood square, migrant experience is rewritten into space. A photocopier is appropriated in order to redistribute knowledge. Invasive weeds from industrialized and colonized landscapes form alliances with electronic entities. A manifesto hints at how to be in the world by singing with it.

The exhibition seeks (aesthetic) forms that describe unruly, interdependent forms of relating to one another and with the world. These might be based on solidarity, resistance, mutual care, and the refusal of self-ownership: knotting unruly ties.

Information in Easy Language and DGS (German).

The knotting unruly ties two-part web series is online!

The first episode is inspired by a legend about a person who is offered all the land he can circle around on horseback in one day. A number of hobby horse riders move through the city, seemingly arriving nowhere. Neither self-ownership nor their soft protective gear can prevent the onset of exhaustion.

In the second episode, two friends meet in a Berlin späti. In the heat of a drama about love and property, a discussion unfolds about how property inscribes itself into our bodies and our relationships.

Episode 1: Steckenpferde reiten

Episode 2: At the Späti

PROGRAMME

Opening

Fr, 20.6.25, 6.00 PM.

Disability Justice—On Paper and In Practice

Sat, 21.6.25, 12.00–4:00 PM

Workshop with Sickness Affinity Group

Sickness Affinity Group invites you to Disability Justice—On Paper and In Practice, an open-format workshop, reading room, and creative studio. Together, we will explore what it means to practice disability justice in our communities, movements, and politics—not only in theory, but also through embodied collective action.

This will be a space to read, reflect, and create. It will include:

- A curated library to browse and make copies from

- A crafting zone for making protest signs, banners, and shields

- A flexible structure that invites you to stay for as long or short as you like

- The freedom to work collaboratively or individually, to rest or to build

The workshop is inspired by the conviction that disability justice is not only about access or rights but about resisting violent and extractive systems and building new, interdependent forms of relation. This includes recognizing that the current struggles for liberation in Abya Yala and Turtle Island, Artsakh, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kashmir, Myanmar, Palestine, Sudan, Syri​​​​​​​a, Ukraine, West Papua, and Yemen, ​​​​​​​as well as the struggles of other peoples resisting oppression, are an issue of disability justice that cannot be ignored.

Given that European democracies are active perpetrators of global harm, we come together to ask: How do we reconcile the state assistance some of us receive with state involvement in genocidal policies and the criminalization of migration through violent border regimes? How do ideas about who is “fit” or “worthy” still shape who is considered a full member of society and who is eligible for government assistance in the first place? What does it mean to reside in a country that is complicit in systemic resource theft and large-scale environmental destruction? And what forms resistance are we willing to take in the face of these ongoing crimes?

Access Info

- Languages: Spoken and written English and German (most reading materials in English, some in German)

- Elevator and escalator access to 1st floor (Directions for barrier-free access here)

- Accessible toilets available

- Quiet space available

- You can visit this link for more accessibility details: https://ngbk.de/en/besuch/barrierefreiheit/mobilitaet

Covid Protocol

To help us reduce the spread of COVID and prevent the possibility of long-term health effects we ask that:

- You have a negative test result from that same day. Rapid tests are available at DM, Rossmann, and most supermarkets. We will have some available, though supplies are limited.

- You wear a mask! We will have some at the door.

- If you’re feeling unwell or have recently been exposed to COVID, please stay home.

How to Steal: Art as a Tool of Strategic Imagination

Thu, 10.7.25, 6.00–8.30 pm

Workshop with Pass on Press & Joshua Davila

Pass on Press invites you to an evening of strategizing within, against and beyond the institution, discussing using art as a tool for expropriation and redistribution of resources, and creating work for movements beyond ‘awareness raising’.

In the second part of our workshop, Josh Davila (the ‘blockchain socialist’) will walk participants through some of the potential advantages of using crypto currency in support of radical, anti-propertarian movement work, and help those interested in setting up your own crypto wallet.

Pass on Press is an independent, self-organized guerilla publishing group and front for various other projects of the radical imagination.

Joshua Davila is the writer and podcaster of The Blockchain Socialist and co-founder of Bread Cooperative, a crypto project pursuing the creation of post-capitalist applications. He is also the author of Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It.

Guided Tour

Sun, 13.7.25, 4.00–5.00 pm

with the work group knotting unruly ties

Me & my body within us & our bodies

Wed, 23.7.25, 4.00–7.00 pm

Workshop with Casa Kuà

hosted by Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi

This is an invitation to all QTI BIPoCS to a circle where we will collectively explore and discuss our relationships to ourselves, our bodies, communities and kinships – surrounded by, within and in resistance to white colonial patriarchal capitalist societies.

This workshop will involve discussions and somatic practices that explore what we hold in our bodies. What do we want to keep? What would we like to let go of? How can we cultivate more space within us for resilience?

Casa Kuà is self-organised by trans* and non binary BIPoCs to make health more accessible to other trans*, inter*, non binary and queer people, and especially for those affected by racism. The aim of Casa Kuà is to bring traditional and conventional medical treatments together.

Guided Tour

Thu, 24.7.25, 4.00–4.30 pm

with the work group knotting unruly ties.

How do we self-organize?

Thu, 24.7.25, 6.00–9.00 pm

Workshop, with the bbk berlin e.V. Arbeitsgruppe Art Worker Solidarity, Jan Kunkel, Dietrich Meyer, Ragnhild Aamås/UKS Oslo (Unge Kunstneres Samfund/Young Artists’ Society).

The current cultural and political moment brings with it unprecedented challenges for cultural workers in Berlin. On top of already precarious working conditions, art workers are affected by dramatic funding cuts. These impede the accessibility of art production and art spaces, and often lead to the selective deplatforming of critical voices and resistant practices.

What forms of self-organization might allow art workers to push back against the isolation and individualisation they face as freelancers in this context? What histories and practices of organising around working conditions can be drawn on, and what does the model of the union have to offer? This event brings together representative examples from North European and local contexts in order to discuss how to continue to collectivise art workers’ struggles.

This event includes inputs on three questions from invited guests:

In what context do we organise, as non-German and German art workers? Jan Kunkel will trace a brief historical arc of the structural contradictions between unitary and individual union models in Germany—and ask how these have conditioned the political horizon of an organized mass labour movement under capital.

What rights do freelancers have and what challenges do they face in organizing around labour? Dietrich Meyer will discuss his experience organizing as a freelance worker in Germany, and talk about models of solidarity-based organizing among technicians in galleries and museums.

How do other artists’ associations in Northern Europe organise? Ragnhild Aamås, Chair of the UKS / Young Artists’ Society in Oslo, will talk about the history and structure of the UKS, how it supports both non-EU/EEA artists and Norwegian artists, and how to maintain independence in an arts scene that is predominantly state-funded.

Inputs from the three speakers will be followed by a discussion with all present, moderated by Constanza Mendoza.

Jan Kunkel works with language, objects, and their dissimulation. She is closely invested in the intricacies of economic and libidinal logics—how these domains might disattune from common notions of infrastructural procurement and solo practice. Recent exhibitions and performances include Kunstverein München, Munich (2023); Studiengalerie 1.357, Frankfurt (2023); di volta in volta, Paris (2024); au JUS, Brussels (2025); Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2025); and Hours, Berlin (2025).

Dietrich Meyer is an artist, silkscreen printing business owner, and former art technician (he still does this from time to time for money). As an artist, he has exhibited at MATCA (Cluj, RO), gr_und (Berlin, DE), Adjunct Positions (Los Angeles, USA), as well as Manifesta 12 (Palermo, IT), among others. He is the cofounder of the now defunct artist run space, High Tide, in Philadelphia. He recently reopened his business, Et al. Press, which specializes in silkscreen printing. He has worked as an art technician across various institutions, galleries, auction houses, as well as working for other artists in the US and across Europe over the last 16 years. He is a former labor organizer, though he finds himself being drawn back into this work as of recently.

Ragnhild Aamås studied archeology and philosophy at the University of Oslo, MRes Art: Exhibition Studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and completed her MA at Oslo National Academy of Fine Art in 2012. As an artist and writer she has initiated and run reading groups since then, and held various offices in the artist associations UKS (Young Artists Society, currently as chair), NBK (the association of Norwegian Visual Artists) and BOA (the association of visual artist in Oslo and Akershus county). Between 2014-2021 she reimagined and co-directed the artist run exhibition space Podium together with Ayat Tuleubek and Ignas Krunglevicius.

The AG Art Worker Solidarity was formed within the bbk-Berlin (Berlin Visual Artists’ Association) in response to known cases of censorship and silencing of visual artists in Berlin due to their positions in solidarity with Palestine, as well as the ongoing, intentional precarisation of artists through defunding and attempted deportation, all of which are exacerbated by the rise and normalisation of right-wing extremism. Rather than seeing these as isolated phenomena, the AG Art Worker Solidarity seeks to collectively push back against repression by inviting members to meet each other regularly to establish and strengthen intersectional networks of solidarity.

Live Screen Printing

Fri, 25.7.25, 6.00–8.00 pm

Live screen printing in the exhibition space with Pass on Press

Amanda Priebe’s work Invitation (On Praxis) (2025) consists of a photocopier, silkscreening equipment, a collection of books, and posters. For the duration of the exhibition, visitors are welcome to take copies of the posters, browse the texts, and make use of the photocopier. Both silkscreening equipment and photocopier will later be reappropriated for community use. Here, art is turned towards a praxis that is determinedly anti-proprietary: both knowledge and infrastructure are freely bootlegged in support of community resistance.

Accompanying the work is a text by US-American writer and activist Meridel Le Sueur (1900–1996), in which she sharply observes that art is all-too-often funded by states in order to „perfume the scent of death.“ Instead, Le Sueur urges for artistic practices that come „from the struggle of the people.“

For this event, Pass on Press invites you to a live silkscreen session in the exhibition space to honour the words of Meridel Le Sueur. Bring your own T-shirts and other items to print them with her words!

Pass on Press is an independent, self-organized guerilla publishing group and front for various other projects of the radical imagination.

Social Knotting Practice

A Box of Unruly Knotting Delights

Sat, 23.8.25, 5.00 pm

Closing Event

To conclude the project, the curators would like to knot unruely ties one more time with contributors and interested folks.

At 5:30 PM, Lubna Alsarraj will give a Dabke Dance workshop as a collective social practice of connection, resistance, and transformation.

From 7 PM, Mahmoud Abu Banat will serve us a meal.

And afterwards, DJ URSUS will make the carefully crafted floor vibrate with his vibes.

Lubna is a Palestinian traditional dancer and licensed physiotherapist based in Berlin. Trained in dabkeh and contemporary dance, she combines her cultural roots with therapeutic movement to support healing, body awareness, and connection. Lubna believes that the body holds memory – and that through movement, we can reconnect, resist, and create space for care and transformation.

URSUS is the DJ alias of the interdisciplinary Berlin-based artist Bär Kittelmann. His DJ sets are particularly characterized by his playful and cross-genre approach. URSUS is goofy, sexy, and above all, fun.