HEAVEN CAME DOWN LIKE A BLANKET

Ahu Dural's artistic practice includes drawings, collages, furniture objects and sculptures. Of central importance here is the aesthetic examination of spaces and surfaces, based on the architecture that surrounded Dural as she was growing up. Her works tell of a chapter in German-Turkish social history, written in Berlin-Siemensstadt. At the same time, they encourage viewers to reflect on their own past and personal relationships.

Harry Hachmeister relates different materials and techniques to each other in his work. In his paintings, photographs and ceramics, Hachmeister explores aspects of desire, intimacy and physicality. The artist's works draw attention to the ambivalences, blurs and ambiguities that underlie these facets of identity. Again and again, Hachmeister focuses on processes of change, on provisional and intermediate stages.

In her works, the draughtswoman Katharina Reinsbach deals with remembering and understands this as a multi-layered process that is simultaneously physical, emotional and social. Her works take the artist back to places that are emotional for her. At the same time, they allow viewers to develop their own associations and search for points of reference. Reinsbach works both with graphite pencil and with the solvent acetone, which she uses to transfer motifs and colors to the image carrier. Her works thus emphasize the versatility and simultaneity of graphic means.

Ahu Dural, Harry Hachmeister and Katharina Reinsbach present personal works at Galerie Parterre, which are characterized by this very complexity of human emotions.

• Exhibition period: 25.04. to 08.06.2025
  

Events

• Saturday, 24.05.2025, 18:00
  
• Reading: Nicht die Ersten. Movement Stories of Queers of Color in Germany with Tarek Shukrallah, Thao Ho and Elija Tourkazi
  

“Not the First” brings together movement stories of queer Black people and People of Color in Germany from the 1980s to the present day. The narratives of contemporary witnesses themselves become the focus of historiography.
This book sees itself as an activist intervention in a cis heteronormative history of anti-racist struggles on the one hand and a white narrative of queer history on the other. This book thus represents both a movement archive and a contribution to a “Queer of Color” critical perspective in the German-speaking context. It asks where, when and how history(ies) are remembered and points out that social struggles in their concrete and theoretical references are situated in a historical context. Today's struggles are based on past conflicts and always have a history, however fragmentary or fragile it may appear.

This book archives successful and ongoing struggles of queers of color, of “elders”, of role models. The texts provide testimony and inspiration for current and future generations of queers of color in their struggles against capitalism, racism, queer hostility, sexism and for emancipatory freedom.

Admission is free

• Sunday, 08.06.2025, 17:00
  
• Finissage of the exhibition with a performance by Grazyna Roguski and a reading from the novel Siemens worker Yurda Gül by Ahu Dural (published 2025)
  

Location: Galerie Parterre Berlin
Danziger Straße 101
10405 Berlin

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: 13:00 - 21:00
Thursday: 10:00 - 22:00

(Events in German)