Talks on Curatorial Practice

09 JANUARY 2026 / 17:00

ZK/U BerlinSiemensstr. 27, 10551, Berlin, Germany

An anarchist spirit had been prevailing in Berlin over many decades. Now emancipatory practices and subcultural spaces are being attacked by both the authoritarian Right and Left

After 1945, Berlin found itself pushed from the center of culture and politics to the periphery. Gone were the days when the city was the industrial center of continental Europe, a birthplace of artistic avant-gardes. The Nazis had exiled most of the artists, many of whom were Jewish, who had made Berlin a hypermodern city.

In East Berlin, a new dictatorship was put into power by the Soviet Union. Since the 1970s, were challenging The hyper-conformist rule of socialist bureaucrats was challenged by dissidents and punks, until in 1989, the German Democratic Republic’s government was brought down by a revolution.
Meanwhile West Berlin remained a welcoming place for artists, refugees and revolutionaries – and a battleground for political ideas. Un-orthodox leftists and subcultures adopted the anti-authoritarian politics of the 1960s student movement and created a self-organised counter culture.

In the year between the fall of the Wall in 1989 and the reunification of the two German states in 1990, a possibility space opened up. Houses were squatted, galleries were opened, basements were turned into Techno clubs. For a few years, Berlin was literally a utopia. A Temporary Autonomous Zone, where the body politic was constituting itself on the dance floor as a congregation aiming to transcend class, gender and colour. While, after 1989, the city underwent the neoliberal reformation of public space, Berlin’s anarchist countercultural spirit was thriving. 

Today, this spirit is under pressure. Emancipatory practices and subcultural spaces are being attacked by both the authoritarian Right and Left. In line with the geopolitical developments and undercurrents that have emerged in the wake of the pandemic and wars in Europe and the Middle East, it seems that public discourse and social activism have turned authoritarian themselves, amplified by the inflammatory algorithms of social media. 

A steep rise in rents is putting a strain on Berliners. Racist micro aggression has become a daily experience for many. The governing coalition has been cutting down the budgets for cultural initiatives and universities. How can the new auhoritarian conformism be defeated?