Exhibitions as counter-narrative in Berlin: Guest instructor Elisa R. Linn teaches arts course Spaces of Appearance

Writer, curator, and scholar Elisa R. Linn has joined the guest faculty to teach the arts course Spaces of Appearance: Exhibitions as Counter-Public Spheres. Linn is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study, Curatorial Program, and was the co-director of the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg e.V. from 2022 to 2025. She is currently finalizing her PhD in philosophy at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna.

Throughout the course, students explore the collections of the Schwules Museum, Monopol-Berlin, as well as the location of Bard College Berlin itself—the former embassy quarter of the now-defunct German Democratic Republic. “​​In the course, we will focus on exhibition practices developed by artistic, curatorial, and activist initiatives on both sides of the Berlin Wall during the Cold War confrontation and after reunification,” Linn explains. “Using the embassy buildings as a metaphor, I’d like students to explore the entanglements of institutional representation, visibility, and memory culture.” Students will examine curatorial practices in exhibitions while also addressing structural forgetting and erasure.

“Having grown up in former East Berlin,” Linn notes, “I’m interested in exploring counterpublic movements during the Cold War as well as legacies of Berlin’s subcultural, anarchist 'in-between time' in the post-reunification period.”

She adds that in the face of recent cuts to cultural budgets, both the city's cultural landscape and lives of residents are continually affected by these topics: “Exhibition-making should allow what is often suppressed in public discourse to unfold—an issue that has become increasingly pressing in the current political climate in Germany and the US.”

“I hope the course encourages students to critically engage with questions of representation,” Linn concludes, “and motivates them to organize themselves, take initiative, and explore the transformative potential of exhibitions as dynamic spaces for knowledge production and critical engagement.” 

By: Sophia Paudel, BCB Communications

Post Date: 03-17-2025