DISLOCATIONS—on the spot

The exhibition on the spot marks the beginning of the third sequence of DISLOCATIONS. The program’s protagonists are Auguststraße and the adjacent Scheunenviertel neighborhood in Berlin’s Mitte district. Once considered a symbol of social decline and ongoing modernization in the GDR, the area surrounding Kunst Raum Mitte is now synonymous with luxuriously renovated buildings, rapid gentrification, and commercial galleries. These changes are explored directly — on the spot — as processes of exploitation and displacement that have shaped the urban space since the 1990s. How can a communal gallery tell the story of displacement and relocation as part of its own history? What artistic, performative, and political potentials are mobilized in the process? The works formulate contemporary positions and artistic strategies for resisting spatial forms of appropriation and structuring. They are placed in dialogue with archival material from the galerie weisser elefant — newspaper articles and flyers from the 1990s and 2000s that relate the transformation of the neighborhood to gallery events — to explore the speculations and fictions with which a place is charged.