The Master’s House

The Master’s House

Lina Akrami, Reza Arabgari, Amin Azizov, Elsa Blöbaum, Siri Dahlhaus, Johannes Eggers, Xenia Fourmanov, Atefeh Ghaseminia, Sacha Ghilardi, Marwin León Szmula González, Nina Hartmann, Ida Hanne Helgetveit, Linn Johanna Johannsen, Friederike Kluckert, Lena Krüger, Lara Meise, Jo Anneke Mückel, Johanna Petersen, Fjonna Ramin, John Rautenberg, Malin Sauermann, Freya Stoermer, Phivos Theodotou, Arne-Niklas Volk, Dorothee Eleonore Wenzel

curated by Dr. Almut Hüfler 
 

Programme

Twenty-six students from the Kiel Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts—from Almut Linde’s Interdisciplinary Practice class and Andreas Greiner’s Media class—are visiting Berlin. Their group exhibition, titled The Master's House, explores the subtle mechanisms of structural and systemic violence (Johan Galtung and Slavoj Žižek).

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” wrote Audre Lorde in 1979 in a brief addendum to a feminist conference in New York. In doing so, she drew attention to the existential danger hiding in the well-meaning attitudes of wealthy white feminists who, despite their commitment to women’s equality, benefited—as privileged members of the dominant patriarchal system—from the exploitation of economically disadvantaged Black women as cleaning ladies, nannies, and domestic workers. Lorde’s quote gained fame and subsequently became the spark that ignited intersectional feminism, clarifying that different forms of discrimination intersect and reinforce one another, that privileges are often not sufficiently reflected upon, and that the realities of life for people from different backgrounds differ fundamentally. With her objection, Lorde drew attention to structural mechanisms of exclusion that are disregarded by those who benefit from them because they are unwilling to drop their privileges. Through the image of the house, the exhibition’s title adapts Audre Lorde’s formulation to describe a general, overarching, mostly invisible, and unquestioned structure in which certain everyday mechanisms—as tools of the powerful—determine social conditions. From the perspective of peace researcher Johan Galtung, these mechanisms—through which “people are influenced in such a way that their current physical and mental fulfilment is less than their potential fulfilment” (Strukturelle Gewalt. Beiträge zur Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (1). Hamburg 1975)—are already recognised in social discourse as precursors to physical violence—and war. 

The Master's House brings these normalized and concealed forms of present-day violence to light—and implicitly explores possible counterstrategies. 

Spanning two floors and a courtyard overgrown with wild urban plants, the students’ works address various aspects and gradual manifestations of structural exclusion and violence. The exhibition is organized into sections that reflect the issues currently on the students’ minds. These include gender-based power dynamics, psychological violence in relationships and online dating, structural barriers related to flight and migration, the experiences of girls in refugee camps, the arbitrariness of national borders, the passport as a factor critical to one’s existence, and the historical ambivalence of the German concept of “Heimat.” Another focus is on exploring class distinctions, bureaucracy as a system of disenfranchisement, low-wage labor, the paradoxes of stigmatization and invisibility, the capitalist exploitation of care work, and, finally, the transactional treatment of plants and both human and non-human bodies.

The students translate these phenomena into walk-in experiential spaces through painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation, and performance—and, for a moment, disrupt their sense of normality. In the resulting "cracks" (Bayo Akomolafe), it becomes palpable—by way of negation—how things could be different: "They [cracks] are not 'solutions,' not guarantees, not final answers. But something about them marks deterritorializing tensions, and obliquely trace out new realities." (On Doors and Cracks. Doors behave. May 16, 2024)

text by Almut Hüfler 
 

useful links

Muthesius Kunsthochschule