February 18 to April 2, 2025

Kunst Raum Mitte was founded in 1987 in the GDR as galerie weisser elefant. The different stories that emanate from it are the core of the program. Through strategies of curatorial and artistic research, the stories and their perspectives are placed in new contexts.  Contemporary artists explore the historical materials of the communal gallery and place the stories in new contexts through their perspectives. The program of 2025 is determined by thematic sequences, with the selection and presentation of the archive materials in Martha Schwindling’s specially designed display changing constantly – creating an archive in motion. 

As a prologue to the next sequence, the focus is on the processes and dynamics of making art history invisible/visible that go hand in hand with every act of archiving. The focus is on feminist readings of the archive. The focus is not only on the existing content, but also on the missing or less superficial aspects of the material. 

The orders and dynamics of the historical material are questioned in the archive space and the potentials of an archive in the process of being created are explored. In the exhibition space, these fundamental ideas are sharpened and female artists and bodies read as female are brought into focus. With a slide presentation, the exhibition space becomes a place of projection that attempts to give form to the immaterial and the invisible, while at the same time continuously moving forward. The materials from the first five years of the gallery’s history tell of bodies and embodiments, visual aesthetics and modes of documentation, press voices and their tonalities. They form an always incomplete ensemble of recordings that make something both visible and invisible. The historical range of the material extends from the opening of the gallery in 1987 to the celebration of its fifth anniversary in 1992 and includes exhibition documentation by Salome Haettenschweiler, Petra Kasten, Bert Neumann and Volker Mehner, Karla Sachse, Gundula Schulze, Heike Stephan and Karla Woisnitza as well as Annelies Strba.

Curated by Natalie Keppler & Agnieszka Roguski

28.02.2024, 4 pm: Curatorial tour through the archive

February 18 to April 2, 2025

Kunst Raum Mitte was founded in 1987 in the GDR as galerie weisser elefant. The different stories that emanate from it are the core of the program. Through strategies of curatorial and artistic research, the stories and their perspectives are placed in new contexts.  Contemporary artists explore the historical materials of the communal gallery and place the stories in new contexts through their perspectives. The program of 2025 is determined by thematic sequences, with the selection and presentation of the archive materials in Martha Schwindling’s specially designed display changing constantly – creating an archive in motion. 

As a prologue to the next sequence, the focus is on the processes and dynamics of making art history invisible/visible that go hand in hand with every act of archiving. The focus is on feminist readings of the archive. The focus is not only on the existing content, but also on the missing or less superficial aspects of the material. 

The orders and dynamics of the historical material are questioned in the archive space and the potentials of an archive in the process of being created are explored. In the exhibition space, these fundamental ideas are sharpened and female artists and bodies read as female are brought into focus. With a slide presentation, the exhibition space becomes a place of projection that attempts to give form to the immaterial and the invisible, while at the same time continuously moving forward. The materials from the first five years of the gallery’s history tell of bodies and embodiments, visual aesthetics and modes of documentation, press voices and their tonalities. They form an always incomplete ensemble of recordings that make something both visible and invisible. The historical range of the material extends from the opening of the gallery in 1987 to the celebration of its fifth anniversary in 1992 and includes exhibition documentation by Salome Haettenschweiler, Petra Kasten, Bert Neumann and Volker Mehner, Karla Sachse, Gundula Schulze, Heike Stephan and Karla Woisnitza as well as Annelies Strba.

Curated by Natalie Keppler & Agnieszka Roguski

28.02.2024, 4 pm: Curatorial tour through the archive