CURATORIAL SPACES

It’s Just a Fantasy: A Matter of Survival and Being Truthful

It’s Just a Fantasy: A Matter of Survival and Being Truthful explores the boundaries between survival and truth in a world in crisis mode. Between AI agents, robots, and human deception, we search for ways of thinking that refuse to surrender. Instead of apocalypse and dystopia: glitches, contradictions, desires. The exhibition asks what remains when fantasy is not an escape, but a space where the future is negotiated.

Raum: 122 + 129

Post Flesh Fantasies: Surviving through Symbiosis In a world where the boundaries between digital and physical, human and non-human are dissolving, this room explores survival as radical reimagining. Through magical rituals and gamified ecosystems, two speculative worlds unfold—each offering distinct survival strategies rooted in fantasy, empathy, and symbiosis. Sensitive Shell Oracle immerses visitors in an underwater realm of shell-cyborgs and shell-symbiosis. Hybrid life forms navigate ecological and emotional fragility through magical activism and radical empathy. The second work, Microbiome Makeover, explores the digital self as a porous, symbiotic entity shaped by consumption, boundaries, and self-image. Using nostalgic girl-game aesthetics, it frames care and play as essential survival tactics. Together, these works propose survival not through control, but through transformation, collaboration, and sensitivity in an entangled world.

Raum: 127

Soft Weapons for Hard Times Soft Weapons for Hard Times brings together works that treat fantasy not as escape, but as a method of survival—a toolset for navigating unstable realities. These are soft weapons: speculative fictions, digital twins, belief systems, and poetic refusals that reimagine what it means to persist, care, and create under pressure. Here, a digital womb gathers consensual data to grow a machine twin. A speculative family album and sonogram reclaim motherhood as unruly and sovereign. A bird, misled by artificial light, becomes a guide through nonhuman epistemologies. A fictional belief system infects reality like a virus, blurring the line between tool and delusion. And a collection of new art genres, born from exhaustion, resists fixed identity in favor of shared maintenance and care. Together, these projects dismantle truth as a singular entity and build survival around multiplicity—around longing, ghost data, and collective dreaming. They invite us to believe, drift, and co-author new futures not despite fantasy, but through it.

Raum: 130

Worship Mode: On Spiritual Interfaces in Synthetic Worlds Worship Mode: On explores the collision between ancient belief systems and contemporary digital structures. Drawing on Nadim Samman’s writing, we consider how ritual, myth, and embodiment are reshaped under algorithmic conditions. The cave—once a site of spiritual transformation—returns in synthetic form: as screen-lit enclosures, digital tombs, and immersive bunkers. Rather than guiding the soul upward, these new techno-caves compress, obscure, and entomb. Descent replaces ascent. Samman argues that today’s digital subject exists between concealment and exposure, caught in a loop of encrypted interfaces and opaque systems. Identity dissolves into infrastructural code; presence becomes performative; truth, a simulation. In this context, Worship Mode: On names a contemporary ritual: the everyday submission to systems we cannot see into, yet cannot live without. These works trace that spiritual terrain—where belief is automated, memory is stored, and agency is perpetually deferred.

Raum: Jungle

Not Today: The Politics of Interruption

What happens when systems are subtly disrupted? This exhibition gathers artistic acts that interfere with dominant structures, not through spectacle, but through persistence, friction, and quiet refusal.

From migrant seeds tracing a ritual line, to memes infiltrating far-right media, to greasy dishes turned into memory and labor; from a machine dreaming of beauty, to the silent exclusions of urban space, to parasitic language systems and the repoliticization of madness , each work reveals what power erases.

These are not grand gestures. They are lived strategies. Soft tactics. Lasting effects.