Jonas Tinius: Curating the Archival City. Awkwardness as Method
Talks on Curatorial Practice
24 APRIL 2026 / 17:00 – 19:00
ZK/U BerlinSiemensstr. 27, 10551, Berlin, Germany
This lecture explores how to curate archives, whose materials trouble institutional frameworks and ethical certainties. Drawing on the notion of the awkward archive, developed in Awkward Archives. Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (Archive Books, 2022, co-edited with Margareta von Oswald), I consider how awkwardness can become a method for thinking about archives that resist redemption, classification, or closure. Awkwardness, as we define it, is not a fixed quality but a relational condition: it emerges through the encounter between the archival object, its histories, and its contemporary users. Focusing on two Berlin-based cases – the Hahne–Niehoff Archive at Humboldt-Universität and the Colonial Neighbours Archive at SAVVY Contemporary – the lecture examines how curatorial and ethnographic practice can confront materials shaped by racial, ideological, and colonial violence. By approaching these sites as urban and ethical spaces of uncertainty, I propose that Berlin itself can be read as an awkward archival city: a space where layered archives of ideology, migration, and dissent demand renewed practices of situated care, responsibility, and imagination.
Jonas Tinius is director of the Berlin-Brandenburg Office for Everyday Culture and teaches at the Institute for European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He studied social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where he also completed a PhD on German theatre, migration, and Haltung. He was post-doctoral research fellow in the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Subsequently, he was scientific coordinator and post-doctoral research fellow in Cultural Anthropology in the ERC project Minor Universality. Narrative World Productions After Western Universalism at Saarland University. Since 2025, he serves as secretary of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and co-convenor of the EASA network colleex – collaboratory for ethnographic experimentation. He is author of State of the Arts. An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration (Cambridge, 2023).
Free admission.
All talks in English.
All times CET/CEST.
On-site participation without registration. Application for online participation: curating.org