Politics of Being Heard

with
Katrin Bittl
Seo Hye Lee
Anika Krbetschek
& Zorka Lednárová

Graphic: Nora Keilig

Exhibition

22/8/2025 – 2/11/2025

Curated by
Janine Pauleck

Program coordination
Josephine Steffens
Hannah van der Est

The exhibition »Politics of Being Heard« is the third part of the annual programme HANDLE (with) CARE.

Events

21/8/2025, from 7 PM
Opening

6/9/2025, 2 PM
Audio and tactile tour with Sebastian Schulze & Katrina Blach

13.9. & 14.9.2025, both 12-1 PM
Monument Day
Guided tour with Alice Lorenzon

5/10/2025, 2-4 PM
Neighborhood meeting “Coffee, cake and listening”

18/10/2025
Daily program as part of the KGB Action Days

2/11/2025, 4-7 PM
Finissage

Thursday, 21/8/2025,
from 7 PM

Free entry

The artistic positions of Katrin Bittl, Seo Hye Lee, Anika Krbetschek, and Zorka Lednárová engage with barriers, participation, and forms of care through different media. Katrin Bittl works with video performances involving self-staging and situations of assistance to question bodily norms, accessibility, and social hierarchies. Seo Hye Lee combines textile and moving image works with personal experiences of hearing loss, addressing questions of accessibility, language, and shared understanding. In her multisensory installation and outdoor work, Anika Krbetschek develops a complex engagement with care, psychiatric violence, and the history of the Bärenzwinger, intertwining sound, video, scent, and materiality.

Zorka Lednárová translates personal experiences of everyday barriers into spatial and physical restrictions for the audience through sculpture and documentary photography, prompting shifts in perspective and direct confrontation.

The exhibition is accompanied by a public program combining inclusive mediation formats and artistic contributions. Planned elements include an audio and tactile tour, text versions in plain language, and a performative program. Further program details will be announced during the course of the exhibition.

Saturday, 6/9/2025,
2 PM

Meeting point: 15 minutes before the start of the event at the entrance to the Bärenzwinger.

Registration required

Free entry

In German Language

Link to audio flyer (German)

The Bärenzwinger Berlin warmly invites you to the inclusive event “Bilder im Kopf. Dialogical Art Mediation for Listening and Touching” with Katrina Blach (sighted) and Sebastian Schulze (blind) on Saturday, 6 September 2025, at 2 PM. Please meet 15 minutes before the start at the entrance to the Bärenzwinger.
As part of the exhibition “Politics of Being Heard”, the Bärenzwinger invites people with and without visual impairments to exchange views on works from the exhibition.

The exhibition “Politics of Being Heard” asks what it means to be heard—in everyday life, in institutions, and in artistic contexts. At its centre is how we deal with barriers that impede or prevent access: physical, structural, and social. The Bärenzwinger—a listed historic site with limited accessibility—becomes part of this enquiry. The exhibition understands itself as an open process: it makes structural exclusions visible and asks how spaces must be designed so that more people feel heard—not as an exception, but as a matter-of-course within cultural publics. The artistic contributions show that exclusions are deeply anchored in social structures—and open up new perspectives on visibility, responsibility, and care. Through multimedia installations, videos, photographs, textile works, and sculptures, they make the complexity of accessibility tangible—and pose the question under which conditions participation in art and society becomes possible.

Registration
Participation is limited to 20 people.
Please register by 4 September 2025 by phone at 030 901837461 or by email at info@baerenzwinger.berlin.

Need assistance with your journey?
We are happy to pick you up from the nearest public transport stop. Please let us know by 5 September 2025 via email at info@baerenzwinger.berlin.

Katrina Blach works with photography, video, and participatory formats. A central focus of her practice is inclusive and dialogical art mediation, which she understands as a shared process of discovery, questioning, and reflection. Rather than transmitting knowledge, she seeks to create spaces where diverse perspectives can meet. Blach develops projects in art and cultural education that foster empowerment and enable participation.

Sebastian Schulze is blind and has been engaged in inclusive art mediation for many years. As a member of the Inclusion Advisory Board at the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig (MdbK), he contributed to making exhibitions accessible for blind and visually impaired audiences—through tactile reproductions, audio descriptions, and Braille information. He emphasizes the importance of including blind perspectives from the outset. Schulze understands art mediation as a dialogical process that engages multiple senses and encourages exchange.

Saturday & Sunday, 13/9/ & 14/9/2025,
12-1 PM

Registration required

Free entry

In German Language

On 13 and 14 September 2025, the Bärenzwinger Berlin invites you to monument-historical guided tours with Alice Lorenzon through the historic grounds of the Köllnischer Park, taking place each day from 12 to 1 PM as part of the European Heritage Days. The Bärenzwinger, inaugurated in 1939 with Berlin’s city bears, was home to several generations of these symbolic animals for almost 80 years. Until the death of Schnute, the last bear, in 2015, the bears shaped the city’s image. Today, the Bärenzwinger is preserved as a cultural monument and serves as a space for exhibitions and events. Visitors will have the opportunity to learn more about the site’s eventful history and its current use as a venue for contemporary art.

Registration
required by 12 September at info@baerenzwinger.berlin

Alice Lorenzon is an art mediator with a particular interest in the connection between art and storytelling. After studying languages, she turned to art and has been working in municipal galleries and museums for eight years. For the past four years, she has been teaching art at the Kreativitätsgrundschule. She currently works at the Klosterruine and the Bärenzwinger, where she has been regularly offering guided tours as part of the European Heritage Days since 2022. In her mediation practice, she is interested in the themes and impressions visitors take away from the history of a site and how these can open up new perspectives on art and society.

Sunday, 5/10/2025,
2-4 PM

No registration required

Free entry

The Bärenzwinger warmly invites all neighbors and interested parties to come by on Sunday for a cozy afternoon with free coffee and cake. This time, the focus will be on listening together: we want to provide space to share experiences, thoughts and stories.

The current exhibition “Politics of Being Heard” asks what it means to be heard – in everyday life, in institutions and in artistic spaces. At the same time, it makes visible that listening is a form of care that requires time, attention and openness.

Together with the gallery’s artistic management team, we want to talk about this on Sunday: Where do we feel heard, where not? What structures do we need in order to really listen to each other? How can we create spaces in our everyday lives where there is room for all voices?

Over coffee and cake, we invite you to exchange ideas, listen and experience the neighborhood as a space in which new perspectives and community can emerge.

Katrin Bittl (*1994 in Munich) is a visual artist, freelance author, and peer advisor for artists based in Munich. Until 2023, she studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. A central focus of her artistic practice is the deconstruction of bodily and behavioral norms. She explores the perception of women with disabilities through self-portraits and video performances, aiming for a direct yet unobtrusive confrontation with diverse bodies.

By situating her own body within the plant world, she raises questions about care work, the notion of caregiving, and societal ideals of performance. Her work has been presented in national and international solo and group exhibitions, including Galerie Bezirk Oberbayern, Munich (2023); DG Kunstraum, Munich (2024); HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin (2022); Vivo, Vancouver (2023); and Platform, Munich (2022).

Her artistic practice has been supported by the Visual Arts Scholarship of the City of Munich (2024), the Academy Association Prize (2023), and a #takeHeart residency as part of NEUSTART KULTUR (Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, 2022).

Seo Hye Lee is a deaf South Korean artist based in the UK. She studied Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, London, completing her MA in 2017. Drawing from her lived experience of hearing loss and as a cochlear implant user, she works across drawing, moving image, and multi-sensory installation to explore the intricate terrains of sound and silence. Across her practice, Seo Hye Lee champions accessibility and collaboration, drawing inspiration from both collective and personal encounters with sound.

Her work has been shown in national and international exhibitions, including the V&A Museum, London; Kunsthalle Bremen; Tate Exchange, London; MIMA – Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art; Science Gallery London; Royal College of Art, London; Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga; Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff; Tangled Art + Disability, Toronto; CCA Glasgow and Nottingham Contemporary.

She has also participated in festivals such as the Selected 12 UK Tour (including CCA Glasgow, Fabrica Gallery, Nottingham Contemporary, John Hansard Gallery) and Presents 2023 in Canada and Germany.Her research and projects have been supported by the Vital Capacities Residency and Arts Council England’s DYCP programme.

Anika Krbetschek (*1997, Berlin) is a spring-born artist, curator, and author based in Berlin. In her post-disciplinary research, she relates what occurs at the edges of psyche, trauma, and memory to systems, collective memories, and neurophysiology. Where politics and history are inscribed in bodies and voices, and psychological knowledge itself has a history, she develops a practice that listens, experiences, and distills. Her projects, which center participation and lived expertise, create artistic formats in which resistant memories and inner realities can become part of an inclusory discourse.

Her work has been presented in national and international solo and group exhibitions, including Petersburg Art Space Gallery, Berlin (2024); Living Room Studio, Yerevan (2025); Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2024); Goethe-Institut, Yerevan (2024); and KunstHaus Potsdam (2023).

She has also participated in festivals such as Reeperbahn Festival, Hamburg (2023); 48h Neukölln Arts Festival, Berlin (multiple editions since 2020); and Grenzen sind relativ Festival, Hamburg (2023). Her artistic practice has been supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation (2025), the Culture Moves Europe mobility grant (2025), and the Federal Agency for Civic Education (2023).

Zorka Lednárová (*1976 in Bratislava, Slovakia) is an artist and curator based between Bratislava and Berlin. She studied sculpture, fine art, and calligraphy at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel, the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and the Berlin University of the Arts. In large-scale installations, photography, and public space projects, she explores physical and social barriers and their impact on participation, visibility, and belonging.

Her work draws on biographical experiences and often employs subtle yet disruptive interventions to enable shifts in perspective, question power structures, and rethink participation. Her work has been presented in national and international solo and group exhibitions, including Kunsthaus Dresden (2025), OKK/Raum 29, Berlin (2025, 2021), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2024, 2023, 2019), Plato – Ostrava City Gallery (2023), and Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (2025). She has also participated in festivals such as Biela Noc Bratislava (2023) and Ostrava Camera Eye (2023).

She has received funding from the City of Bratislava (2023), the German-Czech Future Fund (2023), the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe (2020), and Pro Helvetia (2020). As co-founder and long-time director of the project space OKK/Raum 29, she developed platforms for international exchange and collaborative formats.