Doreen Mende

When does social ritual become a spectacle of violence? Within a few weeks I was glad to encounter the work of @yaldaafsah across two exhibitions: PAN (2026) at @ccaberlin , unfolding across Egon Eiermann’s wood-paneled rooms at the Gedächtniskirche; and JARRAMPLAS (2025) shown together with PAN at @ca.buccari , curated by @maurindietrich . PAN articulates a precise sonic-visual rhythm to narrate the uncanny logic of the Paneurhythmy gatherings of the so-called Universal White Brotherhood in the Rila Mountains of Bulgaria. Its camera and sound dissect the intimacy of collective ritual into an alphabet of coded gestures that transport the undertow of belonging, the maelstrom of being drawn into an own chosen circle of spiritual subjection. It made me think of the folk-horror film Midsommar (2019, @ariaster2 ), in which folkloristic group dynamics lead to emotional atrophy, dysfunctional relationships, and ultimately human sacrifice. At the Venice exhibition, the earlier work JARRAMPLAS sharpens the dimension of ritual force: a group of people hurling root vegetables toward a target that remains outside the frame. Afsah shows only one side of the scene — eclipsing the opponent, the origin, the reason. We don’t know why and to whom they are throwing. Only the title might help us to understand: an annual pageant ceremony in a Spanish village in January. The elliptical image withholds judgment while producing something more unsettling: the bystander pulled into the spectacle remains left in their own complicit delusion. Image 1+2 : PAN Image 3: JARRAMPLAS, film stills @yaldaafsah

Through Zurich. Three shows. Three questions: Who holds the tools of image-making? Who owns the conditions of art production? What can art do for people narrating unedited histories? 1+2 #Disobedience #Archive (Canopy for Broken Times) in Dialogue with Raqs Media Collective by @marco_scotini @migrosmuseum 50 films in five chapters with artists’ intervals and interventions by Ursula Biemann, Graciela Carnevale, and Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme: an archive build over 30 years, still necessary. 3+4 #JamesKerryMarshall @kunsthauszuerich most comprehensive survey of his work in Europe so far; a practice situated in a Black Radical Tradition as a condition of thought across art, literature, film and social life. His work puts the politics of defining terms and conditions of art-making on display. 5+6 “A Kind of Paradise” Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art @museumrietberg with works by Cedric Kouamé (and a curatorial text by @iubizzle ), @tuliphoenix @andreachungstudio many more a.o. extending the mediality of photography into ecological decay, salt crystallization, looking back, repair…

TURANDOT: TO DAUGHTERS OF THE EAST, curated by @ardalanziba @parasolunit deepens a consciousness of feminine wisdom across generations. Between grandmothers to mothers to daughters to granddaughters. It speaks of a tender and powerful confidence of the entangled cultural geographies of #Turandokht that means in Farsi the regions including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan —- all former Soviet republics that always had but structurally have emancipated from the coloniality of socialist modernity after 1990. There is a whole new generation of women-artists tackling the clandestinely rehearsed and never forgotten forms of embodied knowledge transmitted by sounds, songs, and soil. The exhibition brings eleven artists together who narrate the transmutations of archival material, myths, fabrics and architectural sites into pluritemporal stories of the present. Image 1 @madikendraws Image 3 @dariakimdariakimdariakimdaria and #lidaabdul #afruzamighi Huma Bhabha @mona_hatoum @saodatismailova Nazira Kamini Farideh Lashai @talamadani The exhibition opened with a beautiful performance (I didn’t take an image) by @turkoz.saadet

IN MINOR KEYS @labiennale 2026 unfolds a web of relations of practices, friendship, voices, and care within a world that is in pain. It invokes “art (as) a spiritual-social science” (Koyo Kouoh, 2024) to an overwhelming extent. Arsenale follows a rhythm specifically, in which each artist’s work can breathe, have space, and relate to each other. One feels that the curatorial necessity follows the desire to be in conversation and not in single works. What an uplifting to encounter such curatorial urgency for thinking together. IN MINOR KEYS is not a theme but a score, a precisely enunciated curatorial vision, that entrusts art with the profound capacity, for example, to analyze soil as an archive of deep / political time, to enter plural knowledge systems, to facilitate society- and community-building, and to believe in art as an own epistemic-poetic power. This approach is singular, yet, it also reminds me on Okwui Enwezor’s understanding to reflect and build the conditions in and from which an exhibition appears. There is so much to process, revisit, rethink, learn and unlearn, mourn, love, and transform. Congratulations 🎉 @rashasalti @neneperei @siddharthamitter 🖤 in memory of @madamekoyo Images @otobongnkanga #BlackEarthCalendar @data_body #joanahadjithomas #khaliljoreige @abboutjoana @blaxtarlines @iubizzle @gasfoundation @urielorlow @permactivie @akinbodeakinbiyi #issasamb @eric_baudelaire #@bonniedevine_art khaledsabsabi @peacefender @theoeshet WalidRaad

RUIN is settling in. #HenrikeNaumann @sungtieu @deutscherpavillon curated by @kathleen.reinhardt speaks of a zone of slumbering horror beneath the beauty of design, the architecture, the facades of “my own private Germany” (Eric Santner). Henrike’s occupation of the pavilion has moved beyond the scenographic environment of post-modern nationalism by dissecting its elements into an atlas of figures. Or are these ruins? I didn’t take a picture of Sung’s wall labels, unfortunately, because they seem to be critical together with the work. I agree with my colleague Signe who was compelled by Sung’s choice of Schoko-Marienkaefer invading the pavilion’s monstrosity into an uncanny habitat. While the outside turned into a facade of squatted snd graffitied socialist modernity. Glad I was able to see the performance too with Milva’s lullaby Ninna Nanna 1932 adapting #bertoltbrecht #congratulations 🪩🖤🎊

Why contemporary art research are important in contexts of technology, indigenous knowledge and raw earth extraction: Kiruna is a profoundly global infrastructure within a deeply situated consciousness. It is located in the Arctic of the Swedish North with a large Sámi community. The city is built on the world-largest mine of iron ore that is subject to extraction for more than a 100 years. Kiruna also is home of the @kin.museum.for.samtidskonst KIN Museum for Contemporary Art, directed by #MariaLind, with whom the #StannakiForum @skd.museum collaborated in 2024. Following our earlier initiative at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, I had the privilege to visit the KIN Museum and the mine last week. The museum does extraordinarily important work by engaging with the existing art collection, the people living and working there, archives, artists, international research commissions and how a site like Kiruna has always been interlinked with the world through art-thinking and matter. Deeply inspiring 🙏 Images: @kin.museum.for.samtidskonst Gruvmuseum Kiirunavaara, an archival image with which to imagine the very first mountain opening to extract iron ore since 1899 Infrastructural plans to extract iron ore at the visiting centre of the mine in Kiirunavaara Relocated church Kiruna Sámi craft and culture at city hall’s door handle Anders Sunna, Colonialism (detail), 2016 Elle Hansa/Hans Ragnar Mathisen, Sámisat 01.07.90, 1990 A Hole in the Real: Dora García, Pablo Picasso, and the Legacy of Mining, the exhibition is part of Kin’s multi-year inquiry The Critical Zone. Maria Lind, introduction, Guernica shared with workers (Picasso in Kiruna September 3 to 12, 1965), 2026 @sverigesmuseer @anders_sunna @dora_garcia_lopez

Discoveries from the Muzeum Susch Library: Doreen Mende’s Book Picks 📚 Doreen Mende is a curator, writer, and public scholar. Since 2021, she is director of the Research Department at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden where she initiated the Stannaki Forum. Art and Research in Conversation. She is currently also a non-residential affiliated researcher with the Research Center of Digital Humanities and Multilateralism at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Between 2015 and 2025, she has been professor of curatorial politics at the Department of Fine Arts at HEAD Genève in Switzerland, responsible for the CCC Master and PhD-Forum till 2021. She is a founding member of the Harun Farocki Institut. Her most recent exhibitions include Candida Höfer: Contexts. A Dresden Reflection (Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden, 2024); The Missed Seminar with Steven McQueen, Eslanda Robesonand Aarti Sunder (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and the Albertinum, Dresden, 2022-23). In 2019, the Swiss National Science Foundation awarded her with a grant to realise Decolonizing Socialism Entangled Internationalism in collaboration with blaxTARLINES Kumasi, Oralities Research Lab in Jaipur, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Van Abbemuseum, and Spector Books. Publications, numerous scholarly and essayistic articles published by e-flux Journal, Sternberg Press, MIT Press, Mousse Publications, The Oxford Handbook for Communist Visual Cultures, Jerusalem Quarterly, a.o. She holds a Ph.D. in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London. #muzeumsusch #temporarssusch

(1) Church in #Lavin (2) #Scrafitto neighbours’ house next to #Chasa d’artists (3) #Chalandamarz 2026 in Lavin (4) House Lower Engadin (4) Natur-Culture-Continuum @muzeumsusch (5) 1700 meter #altitude @mareikesan artresearch writing mini-sabbatical

#EditaSchubert exhibition “Profusion” curated by @faktografia.crowley at this incredible site @muzeumsusch with a carefully converted monastery and brewery into an #contemporary exhibition house, collection presentation, library, public art interventions, a #Chasa d’artists and the wonderful Bistro in Susch in Lower Engandin. The work of #EditaSchubert (1947-2001), a significant figure of Croatian and Yugoslav art of the second half 20th century, appears precisely situated in the installations across five floors engaging nature, culture, architecture and sensing in a continuous conversation. Her compassionate conceptualism for the conditions of exhibiting, looking and making meaning through art produces a coherence throughout her comprehensive works of different media. Her work is superbly installed at Muzeum Susch. It radiates her care for reflecting a situated subjectivity in relation to environment, history (of art) and being-present. What a privilege to experience this archive of thoughts of a woman-artist who kept going to make art despite all odds. Blown away by the focused vision of the founder #grazynakulczyk and her wonderful team. Thank you @mareikesan for inviting me to be a writer-resident of TEMPORARS SUSCH that allows me to experience this site over a few weeks, to collect thoughts myself, and to recharge heart and head amidst a world of disorder. A important time to look into these archives at the margins. Thank you Magda, Laura, and everyone else.

#Stannaki #Forum SECHABA ECHOES 29 January 2026 with @katharina.warda and #NeoMuyanga, moderated by @martin_buhlig @kupferstichkabinett.skd @skd.museum #echoing #researchskd The conversation explores the artistic practices of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa within the context of the global Cold War, examining their interconnections with creative production in the German Democratic Republic. In this way, the Stannaki Forum responds to the current exhibition, ‘William Kentridge: Listen to the Echo’, directing attention to the collections of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. The previously unexplored issues of the South African magazine Sechaba, for example, which were printed in the GDR and are now held in the Archiv der Avantgarden — Egidio Marzona, bear witness to a dialogue between Europe and South Africa. Through his father’s work as a lawyer, defending figures such as Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, William Kentridge was exposed from an early age to the struggles of Black South Africans against the apartheid regime. At the same time, he was raised in a privileged family environment. What resonances, sounds and correspondences might ‘William Kentridge: Listen to the Echo’ generate within the Dresden collections? How can the entanglements between South Africa and the GDR be explored from an art-historical perspective, while also informing contemporary research questions?

“The Missed Seminar. After Eslanda Robeson. In Conversation with Steve McQueen” took place in late 2022 at @hkw_berlin . It has been not only a painful joy, but a necessity to stage this research in the very architecture of global Cold War politics that surveilled @robesonhousephl and @eslandagooderobeson between the late 1940s and mid 1950s. The historical context is the McCarthy-era of anti-communism attacking everyone and anyone of the Black Civil Rights movement to world-communities of workers, peasants, and cultural producers. It has been Franz Loeser, a philosopher of organisation (cybernetics) who returned to Germany as a survivor of the Holocaust in the 1950s and who initiated the Paul Robeson Passport Committee at @akademiederkuenste Berlin-East. What can we learn from it today in a 21st century of polarisation? Why do these unedited histories matter more than ever? “The Missed Seminar” studied the forms of political friendships between the Black Radical Tradition, Harlem Renaissance Internationalism and survivors of the Nazi-dictatorship including Jewish-communist intellectuals. I am very glad that @skd.museum supported in 2022 the production of Steve McQueen’s installation “End Credits” as part of my start as director of research at the State Collections of Art Dresden. Thanks also to wonderful Clare @thomasdanegallery and the studio of @smallaxeproject , as well as everyone who committed to “The Missed Seminar” such as #StefanAue, @kraeuterquatsch , #AveryGordon, @aartisunder @katharina.warda @barbararansby4freedom #SusanRobeson #MatanaRoberts #LinaBrion @lllinabr_ . It feels that “The Missed Seminar” is from a different world, yet, exists. “The Missed Seminar” turned into an intervention in 2023 @albertinum.skd Check also the publication @spectorbooks

A reflection on the exhibition “We Show What We (Don’t) Know – Images as Research” within the framework of the Transcultural Academy “Futures/Futurities” at the @japanischespalais.skd of the @skd.museum Dresden 2023, published by #RosaMercedes online journal #09 @harunfarockiinstitut A conversation by #LucieKolb with #MareikeBernien, #DoreenMende, #AnnaLisaReith and #ClemensvonWedemeyer on March 27, 2024. With artistic contributions by #AnnaSopova, #snc, #IngmarStange, #JohannBärenklau, #KatharinaBayer, #KseniaSova, #LeilaBrinkmann, #LuciaCharlotteOtt, #MahshidMahboubifar, #MartaSundmann, #NataliaZaitseva, #SijoChoiKim, #SimónJaramilloVallejo, #ValériadeAraújoSilva, #YunseonJeong and #SuYuHsin. Editorial assistance by #AlmaWeizman. What images does research itself produce? How can images, in both an artistic and documentary sense, themselves become tools of research? As if the images themselves could observe, analyze, comment or measure. A project that brings together 16 new artistic works that deal with research in museums as an aesthetic practice. Artists from the @expanded_cinema @hgbleipzig class at the HGB Leipzig met with numerous museum stakeholders over the course of a year: conservators, electricians, scientific staff, directors, X-ray technicians and provenance researchers from the SKD. Among other articulations, video installations, textiles, an imagined computer game, transformed angels, AI-generated porcelain and an interview with a pistol were created and exhibited. In reference to Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki’s “Labour in a Single Shot”, one could also say that 16 “Takes on Research” have emerged. Images that not only document, but also have a researching effect. Observing, organizing, interpreting, they recognize the museum as a place of knowledge and history production. #Linkinbio Images (2) Mashid Mahboubifar (3) Simon Jaramillo Vallejo (4) Yunseon Jeong (5) snc Photos (c) @oliver.killig @vwedemeyer @lucieemiliekolb @annalisarth #forschungskd