Dates:
Akt 1
For staying is nowhere.
June 12–14, 2026
Akt 2
Does the cosmic space,
we dissolve into, taste of us then?
August 7–9, 2026
Akt 3
Nowhere will world be, but within.
October 16–18, 2026
Loosely drawing on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1922), the artistic program of the Bärenzwinger unfolds in a four-part dramaturgy between 15 May and 18 October. Written over the course of ten years, Rilke’s cycle of elegies traces a movement of searching that begins with an invocation of places, people, and things from the past, and gradually leads to the question of how to engage with what is missing. Within the tension between conservation and transformation, the Bärenzwinger monument becomes both setting and stage for an artistic exploration of how loss might be approached in the face of an uncertain future.
Rilke’s response is not a resolution but a movement: memories do not survive through preservation alone, but by entering new contexts and changing in the process—thus opening a path for what does not yet exist. While the elegies themselves offer no final closure, the program sets a trajectory toward the tenth anniversary of the Bärenzwinger as a municipal gallery in 2027.
Curated by Luise Haubenreiser, Philipp Hennch, Pauline Kling, Kaya Peters and Josephine Steffens
Program Akt I
LINE UP
Friday, 12.06.
7 – 10 PM: Session with DJ theories
Saturday, 13.06.
2 – 4 PM: Workshop „How to perform a scream” with Nadja Kracunovic
5 – 7 PM: Lecture Performance with Paula Schopf
7 – 8 PM: Butoh dance improvisation and live sopran singing of dancer Sofya Sheikut and sopran Katsia Kaya
Sunday, 14.06.
2 – 3 PM: Radio Performance with Jasmina Al Qaisi
5 – 6 PM: Performance with Agata Siniarska
Under the title For staying is nowhere, the first act of the program invites a form of invocation and explores ways of bringing what is hidden to the surface. Voice, sound, and bodily forms of expression intertwine to create a polyphonic tapestry. The program moves between the experimental sound works of DJ theories and a lecture-performance by Paula Schopf. It invites participants to engage in physical exploration through Nadja Kracunovics’s workshop How to Perform a Scream, brings together Butoh improvisation and soprano singing in the encounter between Sofya Sheikut and Katsia Kaya, and concludes with a radio performance by Yasmeen Al-Qaisi and a performative reverberation by Agata Siniarska.
Friday, June 12, 7–10 p.m.: Listening Session with DJ theories
theories is an audiovisual artist and music collector from Bogotá, based in Berlin. For over a decade, she has explored the sonic spectrum with a focus on unexpected compositions, odd electronics, broken rhythms and subtle depth. Blending atmospheric soundscapes with spontaneity, she creates immersive listening experiences between movement and stillness. Her sets invite audiences into layered sonic narratives shaped by imagination, harmony and rhythm.
Saturday, June 13, 2:00–4:00 p.m. (may be extended until 5:00 p.m.): Workshop “How to Perform a Scream (I Keep a Roar in My Mouth)” with Nadja Kracunovic
How to Perform a Scream? is a workshop series exploring voice as a tool of resistance, memory, and collective disobedience. Through vocal exercises, text, spoken word, polyphony, and experimental choir practices, participants engage the voice as a site of personal and political histories. Led by Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist Nadja Kracunovic, the workshop draws on performance, crip theory, and critical pedagogy to challenge dominant narratives through sound and expression.
Saturday, June 13, 5–6 p.m.: Lecture performance with Paula Schopf
Paula Schopf is a Chilean-born, Berlin-based DJ, producer, sound artist, and researcher. Emerging from Berlin’s electronic music scene in the late 1990s as Chica Paula, she became part of the Chilean Connection alongside artists such as Ricardo Villalobos and Dinky. Today, her practice spans sound art, research, and education. Working with field recordings and synthetic sound, her installations and performances allow an engagement with aesthetic, social and political questions through listening.
Saturday, June 13, 7–8 p.m.: Performance by Sofya Shaikut, accompanied by soprano Katsia Kaya
Sofya’s pieces are often invitations to become something else: an image, a rhythm, an unknown being. Her work is a shapeshifting practice grounded in butoh and inspired by the paradox of human un-humanness. She approaches choreography as a means of entering into relationship with the more-than-human, cultivating forms that possess the individual, transforming them into else. Her improvisations unfold as a continuous practice of becoming and unbecoming—welcoming unknown presences into the body and opening a path to the sacred through a body that forgets itself in the song of the dance.
Sonntag, 14.06., 17 – 18 Uhr: Performance-Konzert „SHOW ME THE BODY“ von Agata Siniarska alias TATARI
SHOW ME THE BODY Agata Siniarska a.k.a TATARI body is not only what appears to be enclosed within the confines of the skin. The body is a conglomerate of different states, dynamics, textures and images. The body in its possibilities creates a multi-level landscape of movement and sound, it is a symphony of vibrational frequencies. SHOW ME THE BODY is a concert-performance in which the performer’s body travels through different intensities, rippling in all directions through movement and voice. Concept and performance: Agata Siniarska a.k.a TATARI in artistic collaboration with rat milk.