The exhibition entitled “Disruptive Structures” brings together works that use current or historical events or people to address negotiations and conflicts of power on a political and social level. They examine the influence of these events or people on the present day and react using various media such as photography, installation, painting or AI. All artists engage with the intersection of history, current politics, reflection and memory to challenge dominant narratives, empower marginalized voices and encourage critical dialogue about power dynamics.
In doing so, the artists focus on the role of reflection and memory in shaping individual and collective identities. Their research looks at different approaches to remembering and shows how historical narratives intersect with current events and personal experiences. At the same time, they always show a utopian potential in the structures revealed and the media used, which invites us to understand power structures as a challenge to change.
Sharon Paz breaks down the power of linear thinking by presenting the audience with a collage of different narratives in which they can interactively and decisively intervene in the narrative thread of the discussion about the figures of Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin. This makes it possible to question the logic of interpretation of political events or figures and their cultural appropriation.
Luise Schröder explores the idea of barricades and the power of resistance as a method used by collectives in the past and present to break up and change fixed power structures. With the help of archives of the GDR opposition, she focuses in particular on women’s and lesbian movement of the 1980s/90s and examines its practices of resistance.
Christina Werner visualizes power structures based on historical emancipatory movements and illustrates the strategies of subversion, communitization and resistance that emerged in (restrictive) societies in order to circumvent structures and reuse them critically and creatively. In her photo-performance video series, she combines the movement repertoire of the workers’ choirs of the 1920s with current protest movements and thus brings the social will for change of that time back into the collective memory.
Anna Scherbyna, on the other hand, processes her own experience of the Ukraine war as a refugee artist in her paintings and drawings. The works reflect her personal subconscious, dreams and trauma as fragmentary images. Although her works allow a very subjective inner view, they can be read as a collective consciousness in which power structures, dependencies and violence influence and change personal patterns of perception.
