Our predicament cannot be reduced to the dystopian reality of democratic institutions and the absence of a utopia based on mutual care and collective practices in society. After all, while most social actors measure themselves by their level of involvement in wars, grassroots collectives engage in antiwar imagination and resistance, exploring alternative ways of life. The exhibition project “TAKE aSEAT. MAKE aSHIFT,” demonstrates this possibility. In their article, the exhibition organizers Irina Denkmann, Denis Esakov, and Marina Solntseva reflect on the project.
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It is very important to remember what happened to the documenta. After collective practices and non-Western epistemologies took its place at 2022 (see: documenta fifteen, which was curated by the Jakarta-based artists’ collective ruangrupa with the central concept of ‘lumbung’ as artistic and economic model rooted in principles of collectivity), documenta returned to a highly controlled and regulated space, subjected to certain state ideologies. Here we need to ask the questions:What is happening to social space? Is it really shrinking and becoming more homogeneous and focused? Is it increasingly being controlled by the state? What has happened to the curatorial group and the artists? Documenta itself shows us quite clearly the direction in which the state is moving: it wants to intervene more and more.
The feeling of collapse
The streets of Berlin speak with posters of the German army – the Bundeswehr – and suggest that we should engage in ‘something truly meaningful’ – which is war (see: the Bundeswehr poster “Mach, was wirklich zählt”). Germany supports mass murder with arms and media, reproducing colonial violence over and over again. And this nation-state is not alone in this: the United States, Russia, and many others have suddenly ceased to be ashamed of their imperial ambitions and have declared colonial policies and actions as the official modus operandi of our time. Why do people on the streets of Berlin repeatedly chant loudly ‘Show me what your democracy looks like’? Where does this feeling of collapse come from?
It seems that this feeling is too loud and is no longer just a feeling, but the fabric of everyday life, mirroring institutional and national collapses, climate and energy collapses, migration and military collapses. Financial flows are reduced at the expense of culture. At the same time, military factories are brought to the residential areas of Berlin, such as Wedding (see: die Linke). If only artists were the only ones disappointed in institutions right now! The circle of people shocked by current events is much wider. This anxiety and distrust is permeating the entire social fabric.
‘No genocide artwashing’
In this text, we explore how the artists from “TAKE aSEAT. MAKE aSHIFT,” on display at Kulturfabrik Moabit from September 20, 2025, to October 18, 2025, reflect on questions of collective and community-based practices, feminist perspectives, multilingualism, other archives, and a decolonial focus in Central and North Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe.
Leo Efet, a multimedia artist of a Crimean Karaim origin, is questioning the German monsterword “Existenzberechtigungsschein” meaning “certificate of the right to exist.” The heavy burden of bureaucracy that they encountered in Germany transformed into visual poetry mixed with fragility of the heart and a rice paper. At the same time, the maqaal collective perceives visual poetry and language as a powerful form of resistance. They use a different strategy: the maqaal collective’s strict statistics on the windows list coldly list all the events against humanity that have happened in Germany in the last two years. ‘No genocide artwashing,’ they proclaim through their actions and colors.
The work of Denis Esakov, “BELONGINGS are NOT,” explores how aggressive and absurd the formations of ‘national belonging’ may be. The black, military-style leather belts of the installation pierce the warm space of the Kulturfabrik Gallery. Surrounded by home sofas, tiger blankets, and lamps, the belts stretch from floor to ceiling, dominating the space and obstructing the view, much like authoritarian regimes.
Intersection of Germany’s and Russia’s colonial practices
The de_colonialanguage collective stays true to their practice of intervention and interactive approach in “Tongues are Growing from Light & Dust.” An object-game-alphabet invites visitors to ‘read’ the pieces collected in the suburbs of Berlin (Wünsdorf), compose a word-sentence-installation with them and thus become authors themselves. An action that turns attention to a military colonial context that the alphabet brings with itself.
These objects and parts of objects were collected in a very specific place, where the histories of the GDR, World War I, the Soviet army and Tatar, Arab, Indian, and African prisoners of the Half-Moon [Muslim] Camp and Weinberge Camp intersect. During World War I, 10,000 Tatars – Russian Muslims – were held in the German prisoner-of-war camp in Wünsdorf (see: the documentary film by Markus Schlaffke “How to spell empire”). During the time of the GDR, the Soviet military built its base in the same location, leading to the abandonment of the colonial memory and Tatar cemetery. Now, this place is a forest.
This brings us to the intersection of German colonial practices and their logic of camps (including their continuity in contemporary German policy) with the extractivist and colonial practices of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and contemporary Russia. Both debates tend to avoid critical examination through a decolonial lens and hide behind the façade of ‘friendships of nations’ for too long. Now, these relations are becoming visible, as are the relations between colonial extractivist practices, relations between people and nature, museum production, and language.
Connecting to other-than-human life
Viktoriia Şăltăr explores the relationship between people and landscapes. She participated in the de_colonial language residence, “Voices Otherwise,” and visualized the Chuvash myth of the Three Suns in a performance on Alexanderplatz. The title of her work, “YALT,” means light and its ability to envelop you when it’s gone. What happens when natural forces are no longer present? This question also resonates with the research-based installation “Beyond the Surface and into the Depth” by Eldar Tagi and Lena Pozdnykova. It reveals the connection between the Caspian Sea, ecological collapse, and sturgeon, which have long been targeted for black caviar, a luxury product in Russia.
Sensitivity to nature and its well-being, as well as people’s desire to care for it, can also be found in Nilufer Musaeva’s work, “Homecoming.” Her endeavor to her family’s village, Khinalig in Azerbaijan, resulted in several publications and meditations on museological processes and language. Another example is Nazira Saduaqas’s soft and gentle book, “My Grandmother’s Honey Talk,” a collection of intimate memories in deep blue and bronze colors about a creolized blend of Kazakh and Russian languages. At the same time, it is a powerful reappropriation that the artist’s grandmother created for herself (see: Deutsche Welle).
Alternative systems of knowledge
Thus, the context of social collapse is saturated with various artistic approaches to seeing and dealing with language. Now, especially as capitalism shifts into an attention economy, it is crucial to understand how to develop alternative systems of knowledge and capacities. Leroy Berger’s plastic installation, “Native Tongues Defiant,” is an imaginary bridge between the remnants of once-disciplined languages and the attempts to preserve knowledge of them amidst migration. The Sakha artist carves oversized words in the Komi, Tuvan, Buryat, and Kalmyk languages from plexiglas and wood, along with their shadows. The result presents the body of a language as a vessel of memories and scars. Another example of the Armenian language’s internal resistance within Russia’s colonial systems is an investigation of writing as an act of feminist resistance (see Menua’s “Performative Poetics”).
Finally, two artistic positions depict fighters against Russia’s oppression: the Bouillon Group’s “Palm” and Salome Potskhverashvili’s “Hunger.” The video “Palm” addresses displacement and its connection to Abkhazian residents who came to Georgia due to political conflicts in the 1990s. Potskhverashvili’s video depicts recent events from February 2025. The five-minute video vividly shows one day of the 285-day hunger strike for justice that has lasted far too long. The need to come together and consolidate aspirations, as well as the actions of resistance against elimination, connect all the works.
The notion of institutions and right paths has collapsed. While institutions of various sizes measure themselves by their level of involvement in wars, grassroots collectives engage in antiwar imagination, resistance, and alternative ways of life. A space exists between the dystopian reality of institutions and the absent utopia for mutual care and collective practices.
Politics of the archive
“Kriegstüchtigkeit bedeutet, dass Menschen bereit sind, andere zu töten” (War capability means that people are ready to kill others), Şeyda Kurt said in her interview with der Freitag. In the interview, Şeyda raises questions about how going to war has once again become fashionable, what “Militarisierung nach innen” (internal militarization) actually means, and why feminist practices of co-organization, caring, and maintenance– the logic of the “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” as Ursula Le Guin would say – suddenly seem to lose their validity when patriarchal heroic narratives return.
When nation states tighten the screws, practices of non-institutional existence, self-organization, and mutual support become increasingly relevant. These practices are shaping a new reality amid collapses and offering ways out of multiple crises. Similarly, we can pose the question of the archive. This is especially true of the archive that emerges from the epistemological spaces of collapsing empires. What should we do when the Soviet or Russian archive has, for decades, constructed its system of knowledge in a way that excluded many groups, perspectives, and local knowledge? What about when the Western archive merely reproduced and multiplied this imperial and colonial knowledge?
What do people with mixed identities, nepantlas (see: Gloria Anzaldúa “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza”), migrants, people-between-systems, people-between-worlds, people who inhabit the in-between, people who have always had the experience of liminal space, people who know how to archive their own knowledge and survive under colonial systems – what do they do? They accumulate the archive of their skills: the experience of co-organization, collaboration, co-existence.
Who dares to ask questions?
The title of our project, “TAKE aSEAT. MAKE aSHIFT,” contains two propositions that may seem contradictory. However, sitting down and making an actual difference seem like consistent steps to us. First, we must come together. Regardless of our geographical location, we are able to sit with each other when we can hear each other. Take a seat, inside the collapse, and make a shift. This may sound poetic, but in this case, these words are not romantic. Rather, they serve to preserve the ability to imagine and witness the absence of space for other languages. Other than the violent domination of structures over humanity.
In his old interview, “L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze,” Gilles Deleuze discusses the question of philosophy. What is a question in philosophy? His main argument is that the mass media are not concerned with questions, but rather with interrogations. They ask for opinions rather than pose problems. According to Deleuze, a genuine question cannot be answered. One can only perceive the problem, search for solutions, and continue to ask such questions. However, an interrogation can be answered. How are you? What do you think about the unification of Europe? Or its collapse? Do we need a new army? A new war?
Here are our questions: What are imaginary institutions? How can we develop our independent publishing program? How can we learn in a non-academic way when colonial systems of knowledge fail us? Where can we find this co(un)learning space? How can a social network be built – and more importantly – sustained? How can we amplify the voices of those who have confronted colonial strategies in many translocal spaces?
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