Juwelia's Blossoms

Juwelia Soraya, painting – Anja Teske, photography 
curated by Karin Scheel

Juwelia Soraya is a Berlin drag icon, artist, painter, actress, singer and myth. Her exuberant paintings are characterised by bright acrylic colours, a cheerful, naive style and dreamlike motifs: Juwelia herself on the stage of her salon, everyday scenes from Berlin, erotic encounters – and, time and again, her garden in all its excessive splendour. Since 2019, Juwelia has been designing her small anarchic garden paradise with artificial flowers, textiles, sculptures and plants in an allotment colony in the middle of Berlin. On Sanderstraße in Berlin-Neukölln, Juwelia runs the Studio St. St. gallery, a personal and special place for art, music and legendary salon evenings. Juwelia is the protagonist of several films, including ‘Überleben in Neukölln’ (Surviving in Neukölln, 2017) by Rosa von Praunheim. In 1991, ZEITmagazin named her Berlin's most beautiful female man in a cover story.

Anja Teske is a photographer based in Berlin who takes great pleasure in discovering the unspectacular and the bizarre, treating them with seriousness and viewing them as a narrative field. Her work is characterised by her belief in the quiet expressiveness of images. In her photographs of Juwelia's allotment garden, Anja Teske sensitively approaches the stage of the garden and observes the casual, quirky and unspectacular aspects of the Neukölln idyll with precision and calm. Her photo book ‘Juwelia's Blossoms. The Garden of Eden in Neukölln’ was published by Martin Schmitz Verlag in 2025.

Opening Sunday, 15 March 2026, 6 p.m.

The exhibition is supported by the Exhibition Fund for Municipal Galleries and the Exhibition Remuneration Fund of the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.