Exhibition opening

Exhibition from 12 October 2026 to 14 Februar 2027

Vernissage on Sunday, 11 October 2026, 6.00 pm
featuring the performance in the exhibition Overwrite!: Reading in Rotation by Victor del Oral

Curated by Susanne Britz and Arturo Hernández Alcázar

The exhibition Overwrite! on the upper floor of Schloss Biesdorf brings together nine contemporary artists from Mexico City and Berlin to reflect on the processes of social and environmental change and to explore possibilities for new ways of thinking and acting. This dialogue is enriched by selected works from the Museum Utopie und Alltag / Kunstarchiv Beeskow (Museum of Utopia and Everyday Life / Beeskow Art Archive).

Overwriting is an ambivalent practice: it can mean erasing, undoing or even imposing. However, it can also be a form of opening up and listening, of rewriting what has been, thereby opening up paths to the new. In this sense, overwriting does not merely affect the past, but also intervenes in the present and shapes the future. It is a poetic, political and material practice.

The exhibition invites us to reflect on the tentacular, the anomalous, the unstable. About that which cannot be fitted into the categories of hegemonic knowledge, yet is nonetheless an active part of the production of meaning and of shared life. The works gathered here experiment with other languages: hybrid languages, signs that elude the logos, forms of inscription that do not seek a single truth, but rather an opening towards the enigma. Drawing from various media and interwoven discourses, the artists trace lines that speak of everything from flight to situational and porous forms of life, bearing witness to a shared experience of fragility.

Mexico City and Berlin share a long history of exchange, marked by moments of hardship as well as solidarity. During the forced exile of German intellectuals under the Nazi regime, Mexico became a place of refuge for dissident figures. However, ideas of National Socialism also found their way to Mexico, where they resonated with conservative circles and fuelled the worldview of a right-wing movement associated with the most reactionary aspects of conservatism. A complex, multi-layered cultural exchange emerged, leaving a lasting mark on the artistic, social and political landscape of both countries. The exhibition aims to take up this history as a starting point for a new dialogue that, from a contemporary perspective, explores the significance of rewriting.

The exhibition venue itself – Schloss Biesdorf, the former residence of the Siemens family – is also part of this history of tensions. Siemens established one of the first connections between Europe and America via an undersea cable, which, thanks to the cutting-edge technology of the time, brought distant regions closer together. However, this technical expansion also had a dark side: the colonial logic that underpins modern progress and is based on the exploitation of resources and cultural homogenisation. In this context, the theme of ‘overwriting’ today also means questioning the foundations of technological, scientific and economic development, which continue to cause uprooting, inequality and destruction.

Overwriting can therefore also be an act of redress: not to restore what has been lost to its former state, but to make it visible from a different perspective. From an ethic of care, from a politics of difference, as well as from a poetics that seeks not to close off but to open up. This exhibition serves as a model for speaking in many voices, for exploring ways to act responsibly beyond established boundaries. It is an invitation to transcend the grammar of the present and, together, to imagine other forms of rootedness, of listening and of existence.