TAKING SPACE IS A FEMINIST ACT explores the transformative force of queer-feminist spatial practices. Although public space is a common good, it is not equally accessible and safe for everyone: visible and invisible barriers such as stigmatisation and structural violence disadvantage women and other marginalised groups – and show that body and space cannot be thought of separately. Due to this political and social imprint, the use of space – to make oneself at home in it, to shape it performatively or to occupy it through interventions – inevitably becomes a feminist act.
At the interface between resistance and care, TAKING SPACE IS A FEMINIST ACT deals with artistic practices and initiatives that subversively claim spaces, create protest platforms or initiate places for solidarity, exchange and visibility. The artists occupy space in different ways and thus simultaneously point to grievances but also to potentials and spaces of possibility. Interventions, performances and documentations of urban practices deal with topics such as violence, power inequality and social exclusion and make marginalised experiences audible and visible.
The exhibition understands spaces not as neutral architectures, but as dynamic and negotiable terrain. Safe spaces, ephemeral interventions, collective places of remembrance and new stores of knowledge are created that question established structures and invite visitors to settle into them in the here and now. The artists reclaim public and institutional space in a self-determined way and invite us to imagine a more just city.
Exhibition from May 17 until July 13, 2025
