To Be – Named (Berlin)

The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) invites the public to its art exhibition “To Be – Named,” at Haus Kunst Mitte in Berlin. The exhibition was created by EHCN in collaboration with Haus Kunst Mitte and is dedicated to the topic of naming and the significance of names for the development or suppression of a person’s identity. The exhibit in Berlin is the first station of an international project that includes exhibitions on the same theme in Athens (Greece), Mexico City (Mexico) and Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan).

Names can make ancestry and knowledge of one’s mother tongue visible. They are something very personal, but they can also be something very political, as the abuse of power can be exercised through naming.

The exhibition consists of six artistic conceptions from the US, which will be shown at all four locations and supplemented by local conceptions. With this approach of bringing together local and international artists, the show aims to promote a dialogue among the participating artists with different experiences and world views, as well as with the audience. In addition, specific discourses on the exhibition theme in the respective countries will also be addressed.

The works of Zhaoyue Fan, Jenny Irene Miller, Luz María Sánchez, Bently Spang, Keith Wilson and Elizabeth Withstandley will be shown at all exhibition venues. They deal, among other things, with the loss of identity when names are translated into another cultural context and with the efforts of Indigenous cultures in North America to manifest their claim to cultural identity and attachment to territorial homelands through names and naming.

Tuli Mekondjo, Nnenna Onuoha, Angélica Chio, Jeanno Gaussi, Katharina Schnitzler and the artist duo bellu&bellu complete this selection in Berlin. In paintings, installations, films and photographs, the artists selected for Berlin address the traces of colonial history and colonial injustice that have manifested themselves over decades through naming, image appropriation or one-sided forms of historiography.