with
Özcan Ertek
Zhenru Liang
Vanessa Amoah Opoku &
Joy Weinberger
Graphic: Nora Keilig
Exhibition
14/11/2025 – 25/01/2026
Curated by
Annika Reketat
Program coordination
Josephine Steffens
Hannah van der Est
The exhibition »Relations in Place« is the fourth part of the annual programme HANDLE (with) CARE.
With the kind support of the Textile Research Institute Thuringia-Vogtland e.V.
Opening with Sound Intervention “Acoustic Horizon” by Özcan Ertek
Thursday, 13/11/2025,
from 6 PM
7 PM: Sound Intervention “Acoustic Horizon” by Özcan Ertek
Free entry
The spaces we inhabit and encounter each other in are more than just our built environment. They are the result of our actions, decisions, and relationships – and, in turn, shape how and where we experience care, connection or exclusion and control. “Relations in Place” explores spaces as networks of relationships where social, political, and cultural tensions manifest.
Set against the historically charged backdrop of the former bear pit in the heart of Berlin, the exhibition focuses on the ambivalences of spatial practices: How and where are care and attention as well as power and control negotiated in space? What dynamics leave their marks on the architecture and use of space? The works on display engage with these questions across different spatial layers: from the transnational perspective of the diaspora through the urban landscape of Berlin to the specific context of the Bärenzwinger itself.
Vanessa Amoah Opoku & Joy Weinberger address belonging, responsibility and home within the diaspora. How can a home be built across borders and generations – particularly in the face of neo-colonial land dispossession? Özcan Ertek transforms the Bärenzwinger into a resonant space using soundscapes recorded in Berlin, in which visitors are invited to navigate between proximity and distance, control and autonomy. Zhenru Liang marks the threshold between cage and garden with an architecture of loosely stacked bricks, referencing the Bärenzwinger’s complex history as a place of confinement and encounter.
Sound Intervention “Acoustic Horizon” by Özcan Ertek:
This performance expands Özcan Ertek’s ongoing project “Acoustic Horizon”, which involves a rotating, funnel-shaped speaker responding to its acoustic and architectural environment. For the opening of “Relations in Place” at the Bärenzwinger, a site-specific version of the work will be created. The funnel will be live-activated, engaging in a dialogue with the space. The piece reflects the tensions between proximity and distance, body and space, autonomy and control, and invites visitors to reconsider their position within the social and spatial dynamics of the city.
Mapping Care around Bärenzwinger: What Space Does Care Take in the City?
Saturday, 15/11/2025
3–4:30 PM: “Traces of Care” – A Care Walk around the Bärenzwinger with the Feminist Spaces Collective
11 AM–5 PM: “In-Between. Listening as an Everyday Practice” – Public Intervention by Yun-Chu Liang
Free entry
“Traces of Care” – A Care Walk around the Bärenzwinger with the Feminist Spaces Collective
How can structures of neglect in the city be challenged? This “interactive Care Walk” around the Bärenzwinger explores visible and invisible forms of care in the urban environment. Even within a single city block, multiple traces of care – or its absence – can be found. By walking, observing and sharing, participants are invited to slow down the urban space, take a closer look and experience care as a social and spatial practice. What stories do these traces tell about our way of living together?
“In-Between. Listening as an Everyday Practice” – Public Intervention by Yun-Chu Liang
Visitors are invited to sit at the artist’s table, share a cup of tea, and tell a story. These small moments of encounter interrupt everyday routine and create space for mutual attention and care. The intervention invites people to engage with one another, exploring how shared care can generate a space conducive to exchange and connection.
Location to be announced.
“Coffe, Cake & …”
Sunday, 18/1/2026,
2-4 PM
Free entry
Since 2024, the Bärenzwinger has been inviting all neighbours and interested parties to an afternoon of coffee and cake. Under the motto ‘Coffee, cake and … ’, the Bärenzwinger opens its doors one day per exhibition for a cosy get-together of the neighbourhood.
While we enjoy coffee and homemade cake, we also have the opportunity to chat informally about art and culture.
Closing Event: “on-site Bärenzwinger” – participatory action with Zhenru Liang
Sunday, 25/1/2026,
4-7 PM
Free entry
To conclude “Relations in Place”, artist Zhenru Liang invites visitors to a collective action that activates the core of her installation “on-site Bärenzwinger” – its ongoing negotiation of space and access. Developed in dialogue with the site’s architecture and layered history, the work reflects on barriers, thresholds and forms of encounter.
At the center of the finissage is the shared act itself: visitors are invited to collectively dismantle and rebuild the loosely stacked brick structure. Through this process, shifting modes of access become tangible as multiple perspectives intervene, transforming the Bärenzwinger – if only for a moment – into an open, adaptable space.
Özcan Ertek
Özcan Ertek (*1989, Istanbul) is a Berlin based sonic and media artist whose work explores the relations between sound, sculpture, and motion.
Drawing on his background in mechanical and sound engineering, he creates interactive sound sculptures, kinetic objects, and site-specific installations that investigate how technology, movement, and materiality shape perception and embodied experience.
Through constructing experimental infrastructures, Ertek proposes alternative modes of listening, interaction, and spatial perception, creating dynamic sonic environments where sound becomes an active force that redefines sensory and spatial relationships.
Zhenru Liang
Zhenru Liang is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersection of urban structures and the Earth’s primordial memory. Working across installation, performance, drawing, video, and other visual languages, she investigates how natural forms are shaped, disrupted, and reconfigured by human activity and the evolution of civilization.
Her series of ephemeral installations, “Temporary Theatre”, as a form of anti-monument. Using construction materials in their primary state, Liang constructs modular systems that represent the processes of construction and de-construction. These spatial interventions seek to reconnect artificial structures with the rhythms and spatial logic of nature.
Liang’s practice is deeply rooted in volcanic territories, which she visits for artistic and performative interventions. Her research encompasses sites of geological and cultural significance, including Mount Etna, the Aeolian Islands, Greece, the Balearic Islands, volcanic deposits near Girona in Catalonia, the Roman Castles around Lakes Albano and Nemi, Vesuvius, and the Eifel region. These locations serve as frameworks where the “spatiality of dwelling” unfolds in direct confrontation with the raw, dynamic forces of nature.
Her work reveals how these temporal and spatial layers shape our understanding of architecture, memory, and the environment.
Liang holds a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. In 2025, she has been a Visiting Professor at the Brera. Her work has been featured in collective projects at the Venice Biennale in 2022, 2023, and 2025, as well as in the Biennale’s Poetry Session in 2024, and at nGbK Berlin in 2025.
She currently lives and works between Milan and Berlin.
Vanessa Amoah Opoku & Joy Weinberger
Vanessa Amoah Opoku is a German-Ghanaian interdisciplinary artist exploring history, digitality, and marginalized narratives through mixed realities. Her world-making practice constructs alternative epistemological frameworks that challenge conventional notions of innovation and future visions. Her primary artistic tools include 3D scans, video, sculpture, performance, and sound.
Opoku is part of the artist collective PARA, which uses an interdisciplinary, research-based and performative approach to explore various phenomena of globalization and politics of memory. Since 2021, she co-curates the Balance Club Culture Festival, a platform that examines the political significance of club culture, its role within various communities, and its contributions to technological and cultural progression.
She studied Book Art and Graphic/System Design, Art and Digital Media, and Photography in Leipzig, Vienna, and Jerusalem. In 2021, she obtained her Diploma in Fine Arts and finished her Meisterschülerinnen studies (artist distinction) in 2024, with Prof. Tina Bara at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.
Opoku has had solo exhibitions at EIGEN+ART Lab in Berlin, Synnika in Frankfurt a. M. and in Guangzhou, hosted by the HBS Research Centre of the Times Museum. She has exhibited and showcased at institutions such as Belvedere 21 Vienna, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Staatstheater Nürnberg. She won multiple awards and has been recently nominated for the S+T+ARTS Prize 2025 of the European Commission and Ars Electronica. In addition to her artistic practice, Opoku teaches at HGK Basel FHNW, Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM), among others. She lives and works in Berlin and Basel.
Joy Weinberger is a textile artist and designer whose practice explores textile structures as metaphors for network systems. She combines the analog process of weaving with digital technologies and understands textiles as a culturally, socially, and politically charged medium that opens up new perspectives through its presence. Collaboration with other artists is an essential part of her work.
he studied at the Berlin-Weissensee Academy of Art (B.A. Textile and Surface Design) and at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle (M.A. Conceptual Textile Design). Since 2021, she has been a member of PARA, an interdisciplinary artist collective, and since 2025, she has been conducting research at a textile institute on the connection between art and science
