knotting unruly ties
Exhibition, web series, workshops
June 21 – August 24, 2025
Opening: June 20, 2025, 6 pm

Press preview: June 20, 2025, 11 am
Please register by email at: presse@ngbk.de

The group exhibition knotting unruly ties addresses the affective power of property. Installations, video works and comics by seven artists draw attention to spaces, bodies, and relationships that are intractable to dominant forms of control. During the exhibition, a two-part web series is available online and in the exhibition space. An accompanying series of workshops addresses various aspects of (in-)accessibility.

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.

Art institutions are also inextricably linked to questions relating to property. At a societal level, they represent protected spaces that safeguard freedom of expression. However in practice, they are often neither inclusive nor accessible – despite the fact that many are working to change this. At the same time, art institutions can all too easily be defunded and shut down. In recognition of this, the curatorial work group has decided to keep the security gate at the exhibition’s main entrance partially closed as an intervention for the duration of the exhibition.

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.

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 work group: Jyl Franzbecker, Tyan Fritschy, Sonja Hornung, Mizu Sugai, Ülkü Süngün

Workshop

Saturday, June 21, 12–4 pm
Disability Justice—On Paper and In Practice
with Sickness Affinity Group
In English and German

nGbK
Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 11/13, 10178 Berlin, 1st floor (access via escalator)
Opening hours: Tue–Sun 12–6 pm, Fri 12–8 pm
Free admission
Accessible with wheelchairs and strollers (via elevator)
Detailed information on accessibility is available here.
Information for visitors is available here.

Funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). Funded by the Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media).