TAKE a SEAT. MAKE a SHIFT

TAKE a SEAT. MAKE a SHIFT

📍 Exhibition and a Series of Circulation Events by de_colonialanguage collective + Irina Denkmann

🗓️ 20 September - 18 October 2025

📍 Kulturfabrik Moabit, Lehrter Str. 35, 10557 Berlin

🎟️ Free Entry

Exhibition opening hours:
Fridays: 18:00-22:00
Saturdays and Sundays: 15:00-22:00

Imagination on institutions has collapsed.

In these ruins remained questions, disappointments, shifts in strategies, and wonderful tactics of collectivity. While institutions of various sizes measure themselves against their degree of (un)entanglement in wars and war crimes, grassroots collectives engage in anti-war imagination, practices of resistance, and alternative ways of life beyond media-fabricated ‘truths.’ Between the dystopian reality of institutions and the absent utopia lies a space for mutual care and collective practices. If ‘reality’ is occupied by colonial and capitalist fantasies, then the space of collectivity we are speaking of is not a reality—it is life itself.

How can we think in terms of social space rather than (un)social institutions?

We invited artists, collectives, and friends who work with the issue of decoloniality (not post-, but de-) in the spaces of Central and North Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe. The following activities were our guiding moons: openness to collective and community-based practices, a decolonial focus, feminist perspectives, multilingualism, and OtherArchives. The most important feature is CO: COmaking, COllaboration, COthinking, COdimensionality

There is ‘no’ Institution and ‘no’ Artist. There are different practices blending all those ‘no’s into shifting imaginaries of the practice of being not lonely human beings today.

The exhibition TAKE aSEAT. MAKE aSHIFT aims to bring together a series of projects targeting the discrepancy between words and deeds, the dysfunction of institutional representation, and the knowledge shortcomings. Throughout these series of Circulation-events, the logic of taking a SEAT has shifted. The analysis has moved from the idea of searching for a place to exist at the beginning, to reflecting on the act of occupying a place, where seating together, claiming the right to write one’s own story, and radical collectivity are placed on the same page.

We are focusing on the well needed shift from institutional imagination to collective practices and tools.

This journey had an early start with a series of interventions in March 2025 in Frankfurt in the project TAKE aSEAT dedicated to migrants and exclusion of us from the societies of nation-states. A topic covered with shame, with different -washings (art-, white-, pink-, green-, human-). But in the meantime, it’s swelling more and more. We have to take a seat and talk against all odds.

During five residencies Voices Otherwise (May-October, 2025) in the Open Air Museum of Decoloniality (Alexanderplatz, Berlin) we thought of representation and the fair knowledge production of narratives previously overlooked in the course of russian, soviet and western colonial institutional machinery. Here, artists in collaboration with de_colonialanguage collective practice presented their thoughts and tactics of collective resistance to eradication of their alternative archives. It was a cooperative process of searching for and creating tools to address complex issues that are of little interest to institutions but are critically important to communities.

What are imaginary institutions? How to develop our independent Publishing Programme? How can we learn in a non-academic way, when colonial systems of knowledge fail us? Where to find this co(un)learning space? How can a social network be built and, more importantly, sustained? How can we see voices that have explored and confronted colonial strategies across many many translocal spaces?

Such questions, practices and tools are the focus of TAKE aSEAT. MAKE aSHIFT project. The functions that shape language and sociality, which still largely belong to institutions—the production of knowledge, spaces for exchange and conversation, memory, the formation of communities—are increasingly returning to the communities themselves, to activists, artists, independent researchers, and often these practices are collective. We note this shift and invite you to take a closer look at this phenomenon and develop a conversation around it.

Artists

Ani Menua, Bouillon Group, de_colonialanguage collective, Eldar Tagi, Lena Pozdnyakova, Leo Efet, Leroy Berger, maqaal collective, Nazira Saduaqas, Nilufer Musaeva, Salome Potskhverashvili, Viktoriia Şăltăr

🕰️ Circulation Program:

Saturday, 20 September 2025 at 17:00: Opening Reception

🗓️ Open to the public on/opening hours:

20-21 September

26-27 September

3-5 October

10–12 October

17–18 October

September 20

17:00 Opening Ceremony

20:00 Eldar Tagi live performance

September 21

15:00 Trinketing, ceremony by Nilufer Musaeva

17:00 Transindigenous Assembly, film screening with film director Joulia Strauss
18:30 Discussion with Joulia Strauss, moderated by vica kravtsova

September 24

17:00 Guided Tour over exhibition TAKE aSEAT. MAKE aSHIFT

19:00 Jakutisches Filmfestival Silis documentary film by Diana Khudaeva, screening

20:00 Open conversation with film authors on the phenomenon of Sakha (Yakut) cinema, moderated by Anna Malgina

September 27

17:00 GRASP a SEAT book presentation + conversation with Liz Rech, Irina Denkmann

September 28

17:30 HOW TO SPELL EMPIRE/ film & discussion with Markus Schlaffke, Leila Almazоva

October 1

18:00 alla popp, Voices Otherwise residency at !Alexanderplatz!

October 4

16:00 Thinking together on decolonisation and border abolitionism, anarchism

and migration / Marina Israilova and Nearby Reading Room workshop

October 5

15:00 Tongues of Belongings workshop by de_colonialanguage

October 8

18:00 the current state of Indigenous peoples in russia and their struggle against russian colonialism and war, book presentation: сollection of papers by independent Indigenous decolonial activists and researchers/ with Ziliä Qansurá and Igor Sivtsev

19:00 Conversation with independent projects "re.public_speaking" and "O rodnom" / Dankhaiaa Khovalyg and collective reading

20:00 Slaystans dances at Slaughterhaus/ Kulturfabrik Moabit

October 10

18:00 alla popp, Voices Otherwise residency presentation

October 11

17:00 (horizontal/self-organized) Resistance / fish-bowl discussion with Udi Raz, Ufuk Aydin, Tinatin Gurgenidze

October 12

15:00 workshop by lena pozdnyakova

17:00 Radical Collectivity: possibilities and limits / fish-bowl discussion with Bakai Abdykul uulu (Slaystans), Moritz Gansen (diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie) and Gvantsa from IN THE MOUNTAINS (Untitled Tbilisi)

October, 17

17:00 Mixed Identities / fish-bowl discussion with Marina Israilova,

Marina Solntseva, Ksti Hu

October, 18

17:00 closing ceremony

18:00 poetry readings by vica kravtsova, Marina Solntseva

19:30 performance by Kreolex zentre

Graphic Design: Anna Sukhova

Team: Denis Esakov, Irina Denkmann, Marina Solntseva, Maja Esakova, Olesya Gonserovskaya, Saahan Arigolla

Contact: de.colonialanguage@gmail.com

Instagram: @de_colonialanguage

Publishing Platform: syg.ma/@de_colonialanguage

🪑 Take a seat.🔁 Make a shift.

with the kind support of:

Zukunftsstiftung Mensch und Gesellschaft (GLS Treuhand) and Dialogbüro Vienna

workshop "Beyond the Surface and Into the Depth": BVRE e.V.

residency Voices Otherwise funded by the State of Berlin (Bezirkskulturfonds Mitte)

Dialogbüro Vienna