Press Release I 19 November 2025

Family is never just private: Contemporary artists and four Hohenzollern electresses open up hidden family histories at the Humboldt Forum

How might care and community be imagined beyond standardized images of family? Three new exhibitions—Nothing as Our Ground, Making Kin, and All Under Heaven—present works by renowned international contemporary artists including Sunil Gupta, Haegue Yang, and Jane Jin Kaisen. Shown at the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, these exhibitions create new spaces for negotiating relationships and kinship across cultures, histories, and generations.On the third floor of the Humboldt Forum, four historical electresses move into the dynastic display. Life-sized portraits of Hohenzollern women from different centuries are positioned alongside the monumental statues of the Brandenburg electors. This intervention, titled Relevant to the System: Women in Ruling Families, breaks open the male-dominated self-representation of the dynasty.

You can find more information in the press release or at humboldtforum.org/contemporary-perspectives.

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Temporary exhibition Family Matters
Press Release I Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss
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Images

Mom's Heaven, 2025 von Leonard Suryajaya in the exhibition "An das wir uns festhalten"
© Leonard Suryajaya
Time's Gravity, Meryl McMaster
© Meryl McMaster, Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain
With our greetings from childhood! Poster from North Korea
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Asiatische Kunst / Dauerleihgabe Ehepaar Schäfers, Photo: Maria Sobotka
Anna of Brandenburg, Duchess of Schleswig and Holstein, (1487–1514)
© Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, Alfred Hagemann with KI generated
View of the intervention "Relevant to the system: women in ruling families" in the context of the exhibition "family matters", Sophie von Hannover
© Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg / Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, Photo: Alfred Hagemann
View of the intervention "Systemically relevant – Women in ruling families" in the program cluster Relationship or Family, Sophia von Brandenburg
© Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg / Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, Photo: Alfred Hagemann
Sophie of Brandenburg, Electress of Saxony (1568–1622)
© Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, Alfred Hagemann with KI generated