Passage II

Disruptive Continuums

How can institutional histories be reimagined—beyond linear narratives, fixed timelines, and hegemonic cultures of remembrance?

With Disruptive Continuums, the Passage architecture project is dedicating its second program cycle to queer-feminist perspectives on the history of the Kestner Gesellschaft—with ruptures, gaps, resistances, and alternative temporalities. The focus lies on examining how established frameworks of institutional historiography—such as the three-volume Kestnerchronik, published in 2009—can be fragmented, recoded, or subverted. Passage II. Disruptive Continuums opens a space for artistic, performative, and discursive practices that challenge, expand and reframe institutional memory—not through retrospective representation, but through situated perspectives, affective processes, physical presence, and digital reconfigurations. The Passage becomes a site of opening, disruption, disruption, and re-reading, and thusa counter-model to closed, canonized forms of cultural memory.

A particular focus of Passage II. Disruptive Continuums lies in the re-reading of selected past exhibitions at the Kestner Gesellschaft, which today open up new perspectives on the institution’s history. The project critically reflects on which themes became visible in the institution’s exhibition history and which were overlooked or suppressed. It centers on exhibitions such as Guerrilla Girls (2018), Ulrike Ottinger (2013), David LaChapelle (2011), Elke Krystufek (2009–2010), Wolfgang Tillmans (2007), and Andy Warhol (1981). In particular, the exhibitions Elke Krystufek. Less Male Art and Guerrilla Girls. The Art of Behaving Badly addressed feminist and institution-critical questions, visibly challenging power structures within the art world.

While the Kestner Gesellschaft has hosted exhibitions by artists such as Casey Spooner, Christopher Williams, David LaChapelle, Diedrick Brackens, Eric Fischl, Gilbert & George, Helmut Lang, Institute of Queer Ecology, Jack O’Brien, James Richards, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Prinz Gholam, Samson Young, Trevor Yeung, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Andy Warhol, queer-feminist temporalities, affective modes of knowledge, or mechanisms of institutional exclusion were rarely addressed.

Passage
The Kestner Gesellschaft does not currently have a formally structured archive. Instead, there exists a heterogeneous collection that has developed over decades, consisting of invitation cards, minutes, posters, letters, annual editions, artist editions, and internal notes. This collection has significant gaps — numerous materials and ephemera are no longer available or are now held in other archives, such as artist estates, institutional collections, libraries or private holdings. Together with artists, educators, researchers, members, and invited guests, the institution is set itself the task of developing a future-oriented archival system based on its fragmentary material—one that opens up new perspectives on the Kestner Gesellschaft’s history and makes it accessible.

The Passage forms a spatial and conceptual starting point for this process. It was developed by architect Assaf Kimmel in close collaboration with the art education and curatorial teams. As a permeable structure, it connects the foyer, Hall 5, and the main staircase, while also serving as a resonance space for artistic research, education, and collective memory practices.

Organized around a low-barrier auditorium made of tear plate and a central presentation wall, the Passage is structured into two zones: one area for educational formats such as kestnerkids, and another for artistic interventions, archival and material-based research, discussions, and collaborative work processes. Instead of affirming a chronologically ordered institutional history, the presentation deliberately embraces incompleteness, detours, and friction. The material on display is not intended as a finished collection, but as a point of departure — to be activated, questioned, and expanded through artistic, performative, and collaborative forms of engagement.

In spring 2025, the Passage marked the beginning of a versatile use of the space – both as part of the accompanying and educational program, as well as through external events.

Further information on the event program will be published shortly.

Curated by: Kestner Gesellschaft Team, Alexander Wilmschen with Emilia Radmacher & Gabriele Sand Architecture: Studio Assaf Kimmel