09/19/2025 in Chicago

Scherben invites you to Two Roses and a Briar Pipe, with the artists John Neff, Morag Keil, Connor Crawford, Adrian Piper and Jasia Rabiej. Two Roses and a Briar Pipe is curated by Scherben in cooperation with Leah Gallant, hosted by Co-Prosperity in Chicago and supported by the Goethe Institute Chicago.  Two Roses and a Briar Pipe will open on September 19 2025, and be on view until November 2nd 2025. Please join us for the opening on September 19 at 7pm in Chicago.

Mickael Marman, Dylan Spaysky and Sigmar Polke
Vulture

What are we looking for when we want to see art, even though we haven’t adequately finished our daily work tasks? Can art distract us without judging our limitations in pretending that a life with time for art is possible for everyone?

Art and life might be one, and it might offer a very free form of expression, and its appearance may empower our will and aspiration. In one way or another, we only enjoy art that builds bridges to our own skills and knowledge.

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Kunst wie perfekte Kadaver (taz)

Scherben invites you to Lesbian Legacies # 2 – Archive Affections a duo exhibition of Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Millie Wilson. Archive Affections is the second exhibition of the three-part exhibition project Lesbian Legacies which is curated by Scherben and Birgit Bosold. Archive Affections will open on September 10 2025, and be on view until November 2nd 2025. Please join us for the opening on September 10 at 7pm as part of the Art Week Featured program. 
  
The exhibition Archive Affections presents, for the first time in Germany, works by Tiona Nekkia McClodden (1981, Arkansas) and Millie Wilson (1948, Arkansas), which bring repressed queer history to the forefront. Archives and Museums are not neutral repositories but powerful instruments that de-termine what is preserved and celebrated, and what is forgotten and dismissed as worthless. 
  
Both artists create alternative counter-archives and build their own “museum.” With Sleight of Figure (for Gladys), McClodden focuses on the musician and performer Gladys Bentley (1907–1960), who described herself as a “Black lesbian masculine woman.” Bentley was a queer icon of the Harlem Renaissance before being forced to deny her identity during the homophobic McCarthy era. McClodden places her at the center of a “Black queer genealogy” in cultural consciousness. 
  
Millie Wilson has been developing her ongoing meta-project Museum of Lesbian Dreams since 1989, which tells “the secret history of modernism” (Millie Wilson). Her works The Language of Dreams (1991) and Errors of Nature (1992) examine how psycho-analysis and sexology pathologized queer desire. With Twisted Love (1990), Wilson explores the subversive appropriation of lesbian pulp novels from the postwar period — texts written by men for a male audience, which queer women reinterpreted with pleasure. 
  
Archive Affections invites us to reclaim repressed histories and reopen historical voids as spaces for critical imagination. 
  
The exhibition is part of the three-part series Lesbian Legacies, which sketches, in bold outlines, the cultural heritage of lesbian  positions from the classical modernism of the early 20th century to the present. The project is funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds and is conceived and curated by Tarik Kentouche and Lorenz Liebig of Scherben, along with Birgit Bosold.

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Berliner Morgenpost

Re-Memorizing Black Lesbian Legacies

Panel Talk: Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Birgit Bosold
Friday 12 Sep.  8pm

Scherben invites you to the panel talk with Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Birgit Bosold “Re-Memorizing Black Lesbian Legacies” happening on Friday September 12 at 8pm at Scherben. 

As part of the exhibition series Lesbian Legacies, artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden and curator Birgit Bosold discuss ›Black Queer Genealogy‹ and the artistic engagement with and against the silence of the archives. The point of departure is McClodden’s current work Sleight of Figure [For Gladys] (2024), an impressive homage to the legendary performer Gladys Bentley, whose legacy has been largely erased. At the heart of the conversation is the concept of ›re-memorization‹ and the claim to a radical epistemic sovereignty of Black queer experiences, as called for by cultural theorist Tavia Nyong’o.

The panel talk is supported by Kemmler Foundation and part of the Art Week Berlin Featured Night program.

Harder Better
Angélique Heidler

In Angélique Heidler’s paintings, figures are set against a variety of backgrounds, media and motifs. Small add-ons and decorative elements frame, or adorn, them. They are appealing: glittery, fluffy, smooth, pink, shiny and small. Most of these objects were found in charity or 1-euro stores – perhaps cheapness and glamour do not exclude each other. Their placements are based on personal and ad hoc decisions, like a plot that never settles into a single meaning. On large-scale canvases, they sometimes interlock, then dematerialise again. Heidler approaches these visual moments in her compositions: in some paintings, the surface opens up; in others, it withdraws, revealing only hints without anticipating all scope for interpretation.

Exhibition Text (by Leonie Schmiese)
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Die Leere im Warenglanz (Berliner Morgenpost)

The exhibition is funded by La Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques.

We invite you to our public program at Scherben during our exhibition Lesbian Legacie #1 Grace of Desire (1.5. – 8.6.2025, Claude Cahun, Florence Henri, Marta Hoepffner, Krista Beinstein).

18.5.2025  19 Uhr 
Dr. Claudia Reiche in conversation with Krista Beinstein: Artist Krista Beinstein (auf Deutsch)
22.5.2025  19 Uhr
Dr. Elisaveta Dvorakk (HU Berlin): Queere Sehnsüchte, fotografische Freiheiten – Annemarie Schwarzenbach im Spiegel der illustrierten Presse (auf Deutsch)

8.6.2025  19 Uhr
Dr. Thomas Love, (University of Missouri): „Egoism for Two: The Surrealist Muse through a Genderqueer Lens“ (in English)

The Kemmler Foundation is supporting the public programs of our exhibition series Lesbian Legacies.

Lesbian Legacies is supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.

Lesbian Legacies #1:
Grace of Desire – Rebellion, Surrealism, Photography
Claude Cahun, Florence Henri, Marta Hoepffner, Krista Beinstein

Lesbian Legacies presents a three-part exhibition series offering a fascinating perspective on art history. It highlights previously overlooked viewpoints and honors lesbian artists as both artistic and social avant-garde. The opening exhibition, “Grace of Desire“ (01.05.-08.06.) offers a reassessment of Surrealism through the lens of queer photographers.

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Grace of Desire Floorplan

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TAZ
berlinartlink
Siegessäule

public program at Scherben:
18.5. 7pm
Dr. Claudia Reiche in conversation with Krista Beinstein: Artist Krista Beinstein (in german)

22.05. 7pm
Dr. Elisaveta Dvorakk (HU Berlin): Queere Sehnsüchte, fotografische
Freiheiten – Annemarie Schwarzenbach im Spiegel der illustrierten Presse (in german)

8.6. 7pm
Dr. Thomas Love, (University of Missouri): „Egoism for Two: The Surrealist Muse through a Genderqueer Lens“ (in english)

Supported by Kemmler Foundation [Kemmler Kemmler GmbH].

In connection to the exhibition Scherben hosted a conversation of Krista Montagna, the cousin of John Boskovich, and guard of the Estate John Boskovich who was involved in the production of his films and artist and curator John Neff, an early adopter and supporter of Boskovich’s work.

Krista Montagna and John Neff were in conversation about the life, work, and legacy of the late LA-based artist John Boskovich. Their discussion focused on the creation of Boskovich’s artwork-residence the Boskostudio and the challenges involved in preserving the project. 

Suspension
Burkhard Beschow

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Burkhard Beschow’s video installation provides a viewpoint into the hidden interiors of abandoned buildings associated with the German railway network. Empty and decommissioned, these buildings are vacant properties where access is blocked to the public, and their operations have been disconnected from the grid. Still, somehow, they remain part of the transport network infrastructure—at night illuminated by railway lighting, only lightly restricted by fences or security.

In a state of disrepair, the abandoned buildings are often barricaded with heavy-duty steel sheets, perforated and reminiscent of the inner cities of East Germany during the 1990s and early 2000s. Not coincidentally, this was when Deutsche Bahn began commonly using perforated panels to conceal old buildings. For wanderers, urban explorers, and others seeking the dilapidated, the chances of encountering perforated panels today are highest at abandoned train stations and similar buildings along the German rail network. These are the sites that Beschow repeatedly visits to make his videos.

More than a portrait or document of an old structure, his video installation—composed of thousands of photographs of the insides of buildings—is an ongoing process that poses questions. Probing deeper than other explorers, his exploration goes beyond urbex clichés such as What’s inside? What remains? Look how old it all is! More than this, Beschow’s interest lies somewhere along the lines of Are these the remnants of another world we are looking into?

Beschow’s photographic process, in which a camera lens peeps from one world into another, hints at the 21st-century concept of the Backrooms. Quoting Wikipedia, the Backrooms are a fictional, impossibly large, extradimensional expanse of empty rooms, accessed by exiting reality—actual or digital. The concept was born out of internet culture. We are reminded of a scene in The Matrix Reloaded. Neo exits the Matrix through a door and enters a dead-silent corridor that stretches endlessly. Revealed to him is the infrastructure of the designed world he has been living in. The infinite corridor is full of doors, and each door is an exit into another possibility within this fake world. No-clipping, it is called. You might remember a similar glitch in the Grand Theft Auto video game series when our unlawful character unexpectedly exits the settings of the game and endlessly falls through digital space. In all cases, the protagonist enters a liminal space usually kept hidden from them.

Beschow’s video installation is constructed from photographs taken with a small digital camera; the size of the lens conveniently fits the perforations in the sheets guarding the buildings. We see the occasional shadow or reflection of the photographer, but apart from that, no human figures are visible. The buildings are empty and ghostly. It resonates with the writings of the late Mark Fisher, for whom the eerie is a sense of absence—where something should be there but isn’t. Absence is something we witness in Beschow’s video installation, along with a feeling of the past and its synchronic fantasy about a different, foreclosed future. But unlike the sadness and desolation referred to in some of Fisher’s writings, Beschow’s video installation lacks the persuasive affect found in music or cinema. The video installation itself is silent; however, across the room, a superannuated transmitter emits sound. An audio effect suggesting progression echoes in the space, derived from recordings of Beschow’s footsteps walking through abandoned railway buildings. Also heard, concealed within a pair of headphones, is a probable voice-over that reads a timeline of the loss and sale of abandoned railway stations and the transition of listed buildings from public to private ownership.

Are we to take away that a lost past or an unrealised future is what Beschow is getting at? The installation is not immediately melancholic or forlorn; however, it does provide a space to reflect, without urgency, on our unsettled present.

John Ryaner

Press
Emergent Magazine

Millennial Hallway
Paul Levack, John Neff, Jasia Rabiej, Michel Wagenschütz, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Zoë Field, Shelim Alvarado, Albin Bergström

The side exhibition “Millennial Hallway” presents current works by young and established artists Paul Levack, John Neff, Jasia Rabiej, Michel Wagenschütz, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Zoë Field, Shelim Alvarado and Albin Bergström, alongside the exhibition “JOHN S. BOSKOVICH I appreciate my uniqueness”.

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Michel Wagenschütz’s performance He’s Got It was performed in two versions, one happened during the opening of the exhibition and the other before the Screening of Sandra Bernhards film Without you I’m Nothing at Babylon and organized by Scherben as part of the Exhibition John S. Boskovich, I appreciate my uniqueness. He’s Got It is a performance that interrogates creation myths and narratives of genius and talent in the arts, with a focus on musical theatre and its affect economy. Drawing on the works of Stephen Sondheim and Howard Ashman, the performance delves into queer realities, the AIDS crisis, and living with HIV.

Supported by the Stiftung Kunstfonds