Hide oder Tell?
Sat, 24 January – Sun, 25 January 2026
| from 3 years |
| 1st Floor, 2nd Floor, 3rd floor, Foyer, GF, Sculpture Hall, Ground Floor, Hall 3 |
| Belongs to: Family Matters |
Silence and whispering, secret relationships, unknown kinships, inherited stories and hidden heirlooms. Are there secrets in your family? Are you grateful for them, or would you rather let them go? Do secrets connect people—or isolate them? Through playful, artistic and performative formats, we explore the most concealed spaces of community.
Performances
Experience Sarah Ama Duah’s living statues – hidden biographies can be glimpsed beneath their latex surfaces.
Chinese artist Li Binyuan invites visitors to contribute their own voices and hear themselves within a unique soundscape: guided by familiar sounds of family members or friends, you become part of the performance Plaza.
The evening programme also brings together two profoundly different approaches to the hidden. The musical reading from Hewa Rwanda by Rwandan actor and director Dorcy Rugamba is authentic and deeply moving: 31 years after the genocide, he reads letters to the absent and speaks about family and hope.
Humor enters the room with Jürgen Kuttner’s video snippets lecture — look forward to Kuttner’s family stories from both East and West.
In Conversation
Author Anne Rabe invites dialogue about her unsparing East German family narrative Die Möglichkeit von Glück.
Shaped by stories of cultural repression in Turkey, a new film by performer and filmmaker ŞOKOPOP reflects on his own outing as queer and how inherited silence can be broken. We also host a conversation on this topic with ŞOKOPOP (Ekim Acun) and therapist Umut Özdemir.
Tours, Workshops and Children’s Programme
In the free-entry Living Room, a newly designed activity space on the ground floor, you can explore diverse family stories and transgenerational relationships. Here you will also find a library for all, offering a wide selection of books on family, curated by Black Dads Germany. The craft-based workshop series Gift of the Spider takes place here as well: a large-scale wall collage emerges, a collective artwork made from woven and knitted contributions. Stop by and join in!
The historic Berlin Palace also holds its own secrets. A staged tour provides a look behind the façades of patriarchal history and memory, revealing the lesser-known stories of the Hohenzollern family.
In the live role-playing game Broken Archive, you can speculate in a small group about why a family album was torn apart – and then reassemble it.
Children can dive into stories in the Picture Book Cinema, learn about the nature of lies in a live recording of the Kakadu podcast, and record their own family secrets in the Book Dash Workshop. Children and adults alike can explore self-determination and imagination by painting flags based on designs by artist Na Chainkua Reindorf, whose large-format works will adorn the foyer in January.