Delighted to share the wonderful news that Mental Health Arts Space has gotten a Basisförderung grant (operating grant) for independent art spaces in 2026-2027, awarded by the state of Berlin, that helps us keep our community space running! We celebrate and give thanks for all your support and trust in our work and vision. Mental health is not a luxury, especially in times like these!
Mental Health Arts Space is a BIPoC and queer-led space founded in 2022 by curator, writer and researcher Kathy-Ann Tan @ka_tan77 . MHAS has been centering the work and practice of BIPoC, (post-)migrant and queer artists and cultural practitioners ever since.
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Heartfelt congratulations to all the other art spaces and initiatives that also received the grant. Let's keep Berlin a city that artists want to live and work in!
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@senkultgz
MHAS is a 100% independent, non-profit community project space. We work hard so you can dream harder! Support your local community arts space, empower BIPoC, queer and marginalised artists in our communities to continue commiting to their artistic practice and center their mental health first in ongoing precarious and unsettling times like these!
We are so excited and proud to share with you our "Caring Histories: Asian Caregivers in Berlin - Migration, Memory and Social Change (1950-present)" project at Mental Health Arts Space (MHAS) Berlin.
Gallery opening hours in March and April:
Thursdays - Saturdays, 4pm - 7pm and by appointment
(closed on public holidays and Saturdays with events/workshops - more info in bio)
Kaiserdamm 109, 14057 Berlin-Charlottenburg
This interdisciplinary project focuses on the experiences and life stories of Asian caregivers—particularly those from Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines —who came to Berlin from the 1950s onwards, their contributions to the German healthcare system, and how they have helped shape the city's collective memory.
Berlin is more than just a geographical setting for this project: over decades, the metropolis became a “second home” for generations of Asian caregivers whose stories are exemplary of Germany's history of migration.
Through immersive, participatory, and collaborative events such as an evolving exhibition, artistic activations, workshops, community events & discussions, film screenings, zine & podcast/sound piece documentation and a living archive, the project “Caring Histories” aims to reflect on how the voices of Asian caregivers – and more broadly speaking, acts of caring and care-giving, – form part of a larger diasporic culture of memory that can help us move away from a “Western” model of diagnosis and therapy toward a model of alternative community, solidarity, and care. Overall, the project aims to strengthen cultures of remembrance as they are anchored in migrant histories and post-migrant present day realities. The desired outcome is to provide a space of encounter, sharing and reflection that brings together transdisciplinary approaches, so that the dialogue already taking place at the civil society level can continue in a process-oriented manner through artistic research, reflection and exchanges in Mental Health Arts Space and online.
Funded by the Förderung zeitgeschichtlicher und erinnerungskultureller Projekte 2026, Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.
Poster: Meikey To @eymeikey
CBA: Collective Bargaining Agency Online Workshop with Gendai
Tuesday, 23 June 2026 3pm - 5:30 pm CET
BIPOC-only empowerment online workshop!
Free workshop! Places are limited, so sign up today (link in bio)! 😊
Wondering how to protect yourself and negotiate for fairer conditions of labor as a freelance artist or cultural practitioner? Tired and confused about work contracts and fee agreements? Feeling insecure and unsure because nobody guided you through the process? We’re here to help!
Join Gendai for an online contracts workshop on Tuesday, 23 June from 3:00 to 5:30 pm CET.
The workshop will be held in spoken English and in an accessible, low-threshold, relaxed format, with ample breaks and the option to turn your camera and mic on/off.
Gendai is a collective based in Tkaronto/Toronto dedicated to building a more equitable art sector through collective research with BIPOC artists and arts workers. Together, we will look at institutional contracts from the contemporary art sector to discuss how they could be more supportive for freelance artists, curators, and/or arts workers.
The workshop aims to reform contract language by starting with the material needs of freelance artists, curators, and arts workers. We will look at samples of employment or exhibition contracts issued by cultural institutions and collectively critique them. Which terms are supportive, which are punitive, and how can we demand better? We encourage participants to bring a contract that they are currently struggling with and use our discussion as a leveraging tactic. Participants can also bring an older contract, as an example of what worked and what didn’t.
Please note that we will not have lawyers present at the workshop. Due to Datenschutz laws in Germany, we understand if you cannot share contracts that you have signed, or if you are concerned about breaching privacy laws. All participants of this online workshop agree to keep the information shared within this workshop to themselves and not to share it outside of this event.
Sign up today for the Zoom link! (Link in bio) 💫🌿
Artist talk by Ciwas Tahos
Friday 12 June, 6pm at MHAS Berlin
We’re absolutely delighted to welcome Ciwas Tahos (also known as Anchi Lin 林安琪) to MHAS to share with us her artistic practice and ongoing research. Ciwas is currently a visual arts fellow at the DAAD in Berlin, and we’re excited for this wonderful opportunity to get to know her and her work better.
Ciwas (Anchi) is a visual artist of Atayal descent from Taiwan. Working across performance, moving image, cyberspace, ceramics, and kinetic installation, her body-centred practice interweaves Atayal worldviews to claim self-determined space and presence.
Ciwas holds an MFA in New Media Art from Taipei National University of the Arts (Taiwan) and a BFA in Visual Art from Simon Fraser University (Canada). Her work explores cultural and gender identity, using the body as a vessel to trace linguistic and cultural experiences of displacement—opening pathways toward new ways of understanding, remembering, and relating.
Her most notable project, Finding Pathways to Temahahoi, is a multifaceted, ongoing series that reimagines and seeks the potential spaces of Temahahoi—an oral Atayal story about a group of queer women who once lived deep within the mountains, who could communicate with bees, sustain themselves by eating smoke, and become pregnant by gusts of wind. Through this work, Ciwas activates the cultural and geographic dimensions of queer belonging, using the oral story as a lens to imagine life beyond the heteronormative world. Ultimately, she intends to activate a sense of belonging for diasporic Temahahoi descendants across time and place.
She has exhibited her work at the Discoveries program at Art Basel Hong Kong (2026), Manif D’Art – La Biennale de Québec 2026, Le Ceol at the La Trobe Art Institute in Bendigo, Australia, Sharjah Biennial 16: TO CARRY, and Hawai‘i Triennial 2025: ALOHA NŌ, and performed at the Liveworks Festival in Sydney, Australia (2025).
All are welcome to this event; bring your friends! BIPOC to the front. No registration necessary!
Presenting Meikey To, the artist we've invited to create a zine documentation for our "Caring Histories: Asian Caregivers in Berlin- Migration, Memory and Social Change (1950-present)" project.
Meikey's zine documentation will be lovingly printed as a limited-edition risograph publication and exhibited in the evolving exhibition space in July! It will also be made accessible on the project website (link in bio) in July. We're delighted to be working with Meikey, whose contribution to Caring Histories reflects their experience as a community illustrator and their dedicated practice in anti-discrimination, anti-racist and collective memory work with Asian diasporic and post-migrant communities. 😊
Meikey To (they/them) is a freelance illustrator, comic artist, and political educator based in Hamburg. Since 2017, Meikey has created spaces for collective storytelling and solidary knowledge exchange through comics, zines, exhibitions, and workshops, using analog and digital media as political tools. Their practice focuses on postcolonial memory, diasporic experiences, and intersections of race, gender, and the body.
Meikey‘s work includes illustrations for Carlsen Verlag and Goethe-Institut Beijing. A comic essay on food, diaspora, and cultural appropriation appeared in the Italian magazine Internazionale. In 2025, Meikey presented a comic exhibition on race, body, and gender at Mikropol RBO and a group exhibition at Frappant, for which they developed a digital-to-analog first-aid zine generator against state surveillance and police violence.
Meikey is currently completing their studies in Illustration at HAW Hamburg, focusing on anti-discriminatory visual language and graphic storytelling. Their current project is a comic tracing migration, ruptures, Hakka heritage, and the deconstruction of time as a postcolonial narrative strategy.
Introducing Hany Tea, who is the artist we've invited to create a full-length sonic documentation piece as part of our "Caring Histories: Asian Caregivers in Berlin- Migration, Memory and Social Change (1950-present)" project. We're delighted to be working with you again, Hany, and thank you for sharing your incredible work and practice with sound, collective listening and care within Asian diasporic and post-migrant communities with us! ☺️
Look out for Hany's sonic documentation, which will be in the exhibition space and made accessible on the project website (link in bio) in July!
Hany Tea is an interdisciplinary artist, sonic practitioner, and researcher working at the intersections of diaspora, memory, and care through sound, oral history, and storytelling. Their practice centres collective listening and transgenerational dialogue as ways of engaging with lived experience, migration histories, and forms of social and emotional labour.
In 2025, Hany curated Listening to the Past – Hearing the Present at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), a project that brought together former contract workers from Cuba,
Mozambique, and Vietnam and their children through workshops, shared listening, storytelling, and musical practice, positioning music as a medium of remembrance and intergenerational exchange.
From March to June 2025, Hany presented an audio installation at Dump Gallery in Almaty, Kazakhstan as part of Kitchen Conversations, tracing layered soundscapes of memory, labour, and intimacy through fragments of recordings while cooking with parents. Hany is also a member of the Mutating Kinship Lab (MKL), an artistic think-tank fostering dialogue and collaboration within Asian diaspora artistic communities in Germany.
Caring Histories is funded by the Förderung für zeitgeschichtlicher und erinnerungskultureller Projekte, Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.
Special event! Join us for an artist talk by members of "The Fire Theory"! 🔥
Saturday 20 June, 2026 4-6pm, at Mental Health Arts Space.
All welcome! 😊 No prior registration necessary.
We are delighted to welcome Mauricio Kabistan, Melissa Guevara and Mauricio Esquivel, members of "The Fire Theory", to speak about their work and their collective practice and artistic interventions.
The Fire Theory works collaboratively across disciplines to produce art, curate, develop theory, and manage spaces, fostering discussion on contemporary art and its social contexts. They have curated and collaborated for exhibitions in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Switzerland, the United States and Norway. They have participated in the X Biennial of Central America (2016), LAIC Latin American Arts for Inclusive Cities project (2016) and RE:CONSTRUCCIÓN (2017), a transnational project that explores the impact of the Salvadoran Civil War among many others.
The Fire Theory are currently Fellows of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program 2026.
JOIN US! REGISTRATION IN BIO! ☺️
“We Feed Those Who Came Before Us”: a Food-as-Care-Ritual Workshop by Rabiga Marx, Saturday, 25 April, 4-6pm
This workshop approaches food as an act of caring and as a form of a living archive. Structured as a collective action, a shared tea gathering with baursaks (traditional Kazakh bread), participants assemble a symbolic archive of recipes, understood not as instructions but as carriers of history, loss, transformation, and displacement. Through storytelling, taste, smell, and remembrance, we address our ancestors and acknowledge their presence. The workshop foregrounds intergenerational transmission and explores how embodied memory preserves what remains absent from institutional archives. The act of sharing baursaks and stories becomes a form of collective remembrance and a ritual of honoring those who came before us. Participants are welcome to bring something with them: e.g. a recipe, or an object connected to their family history.
The workshop will be a collective action – we will sit together, share stories, remember recipes, and speak about food as an act of caring and as a living archive. We will reflect on how food carries history and memory, and how certain recipes changed in Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomadic culture during the Soviet period. For example, how cooking practices shifted and how these changes reflected larger political and social transformations.
Rabiga Marx is a curator and researcher working at the intersection of memory, trauma, and cultural practices in post-Soviet and postcolonial contexts. With a background in visual culture and roots in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, she explores how memory is preserved or fragmented across generations, particularly under regimes that have disrupted cultural continuity. She works through a decolonial lens, questioning the lasting cultural and intellectual frameworks inherited from empire.
This community gathering workshop is part of the "Caring Histories: Asian Caregivers in Berlin- Migration, Memory and Social Change" project at Mental Health Arts Space from March - December 2026. Funded by Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.
We are delighted to welcome Nelden to our "Caring Histories: Asian Caregivers in Berlin- Migration, Memory and Social Change (1950-present)" project in the capacity of Awareness & Accessibility Coordinator! 🤗💫💜
Nelden Djakababa Gericke is a Berlin-based Indonesian-Filipina fiction writer, crafter, and trained-psychologist. Her practice focuses on stories, trauma, coping strategies, intergenerationality, ancestral connections, culture, and mental health.
With extensive experience in trauma-and- community-work in post-conflict and post-disaster situations in Indonesia, Nelden has an M.A. in Culture and Development Studies from the Catholic University of Leuven, and was a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School.
Nowadays, she designs workshops with elements of (jewelry-)crafting, psychology, and writing, to recreate the communally caring effects of crafting and story-sharing. She contributes to Tempo Magazine Indonesia, and was part of the core editorial team for an edition of the online magazine Südostasien on “Koloniale Kontinuitäten.” Nelden is a recipient of the Literature Stipend for Writers Writing in Non-German Languages (2025), awarded by the Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.
You will see Nelden at some of the events that are part of the discursive program of Caring Histories. Feel free to reach out and say hi! 😊 We are also working with Nelden to create a Care & Awareness Reader for anyone who is engaged in (paid and unpaid) carework, caregiving, as well as the daily tasks of emotional labour ❤️🩹. More info on that, as well as when the reader will be available to download from our project website, soon! 🤗
Caring Histories is funded by the Förderung zeitgeschichtlicher und erinnerungskultureller Projekte, Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.
INTERWOVEN: WEAVING TOGETHER OUR STORIES & TRADITIONS: THREE WORKSHOPS BY EMILY BASA BESA
All are welcome! 😃 Registration on the MHAS website :)
This series of workshops can be attended individually, or collectively, in sequence.
INTERWOVEN: WEAVING OUR STORIES & TRADITIONS. SUNDAY, APRIL 26, 2-4pm.
This first workshop is centered around the threads that connect us. Each participant is invited to bring a textile, piece of clothing, or photo or artwork of fabric that is connected to their personal story, lineage or cultural background. There will a sharing round and then we will create a textile together with hand stitching, using our fabrics as reference or incorporating them. Along with sharing stories of traditional Filipino weaving, Emily will guide us through meditative, reflective, mindful and somatic exercises.
ANCHORED: HOMING OUR STORIES & TRADITIONS. SATURDAY, MAY 16, 2-4pm.
In this workshop, we will practice setting the scene, making the home a sanctuary wherever we are, and making wherever we are a home. Everyone is invited to bring an object or image of an object, place or person that holds meaning for them. Emily will share stories of altar-making connected with Philippine traditions, and we will make a centerpiece together. We will reflect on creating sacred spaces in the home, how we anchor ourselves when in diaspora, and feeling at home in ourselves. We will support these reflections with creative writing and mindful and somatic exercises.
INHERITANCE: TENDING TO OUR STORIES & TRADITIONS. SATURDAY, JUNE 6, 2-4pm.
Regardless of our family constellations and how near or far we are to our families, there are certain stories, fables, histories and songs that carry memories, preserve our oral traditions and connect us with our kin, inherited, made or chosen. Everyone is invited to bring a song, poem, story connected to personal, familial or cultural history. We will share these stories and connect through voice, song, stories. We will also practice some reflective, mindful and somatic exercises.
Emily Basa Besa is a facilitator of social practices, a meditation and mindfulness teacher, and a creative consultant ...(more in comments below!)
Join us on Saturday 11 April, 2-4pm at Mental Health Arts Space!
A conversation with Fumiko Kikuchi and Lizza May David as part of "Caring Histories: Asian Caregivers in Berlin- Migration, Memory and Social Change (1950-present day)", moderated by the curator of the project, Kathy-Ann Tan.
Fumiko Kikuchi will speak about the process of making her stop-motion film exhibited in the space, "Me I See in You" (2023), which is based on the stories of, and conversations with, former and current guest workers who came to Germany as caregivers in the 1960s and 2010s. Fumiko will address the political and economic aspects of the care industry in Germany as well as the questions of identity, nationality and cultural stereotypes that underpin it. Fumiko also invites you to come and share your own experience as careworkers or nurses, and will share a bit about her own experience of being a former caregiver in Japan and the transition to being an artist in Germany.
Lizza May David will reflect on her practice of working with archives, exploring the gaps and silences between historical data and their (non-)translation into painting. She will discuss her ongoing collaborative project "Nursing the Empire", initiated by choreographer Donna Miranda and further co-developed with Angelo V. Suarez. Taking her painting "Ankunft der philippinischen Krankenschwestern am Flughafen Frankfurt" (2025) as a point of departure—which depicts the first documented group of Filipino nurses arriving at Frankfurt Airport in 1966—Lizza will read from negotiation letters preserved in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz. These documents reveal how institutional processes have shaped the formalization of Filipino labor migration in Germany’s care sector since the 1960s.
Free entry! All welcome! No registration necessary! 💫✨️❤️🔥
