Handle with Care – Aftermath
Film Screening and Discussions
14.00-19.30
Save the Date
All ages welcome
in English/Russian
Handle with Care gathers more than thirty artifacts collected on a six-month journey from the regions of Russia through the Caucasus into Central Asia and on to Europe. Working from family archives, from migration carried across generations, and from nomadic ways of living, the artists cross-map a shared regional history that runs from the displacements of the early twentieth century to what became of the expelled three and more generations later. In their reading, those who fled the famine turn out to share a fate with those who left in the wave of migration that began in 2022.
Register here
For this stop in the Aftermath Series, we turn to the North Caucasus and to the ways artists working there now gather and hold knowledge.
Program
14:30 – 15:30 | Recovering Adyghe Memories
A discussion with Lilit Matevosyan, Mila Khatsouk (Tsey), and Irina Denkmann
In Russian and English
How do we give a voice to what is slipping away? Lilit Matevosyan and Mila Khatsuk look closely at the world of Adyghe culture, with its sacred trees and ornaments, and find paths to recovery there. Together we gather our thoughts on heritage-making, displacement and identities in the making, and ask: what can be said and done amid regimes of silence?
14:30 – 19:30 | Exhibition
Works from the Handle with Care project, on view for one day only, 27 September, at Spore Initiative. All the works that have joined the suitcase over the past six months are now visiting Berlin!
Handle with Care is an exhibition on the move, accompanied by a series of mediation events. An unremarkable travel suitcase carries 34 artistic projects inspired by family archives from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. On its journey through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia, France, Austria and Germany, the suitcase makes twelve stops and invites new artists and collaborators to join along the way. It engages with local communities and gathers new artistic voices, which will come together in a final exhibition in Frankfurt am Main.
15:30 – 16:30 | Film Screenings (free of charge)
Film Screening
"Dreams of Present" (2024),
Directed by Rusudan Mirobzalova, 18 min.
(Georgian, English)
"Kletka ischtschet ptizu" (The Cage Is Looking for a Bird), 2023
Directed by Malika Musaeva
87 min
Chechen with English subtitles
17:00–19:30
Discussion with Malika Musaeva (tbc), Rusudan Mirobsalova, and Anna Malgina
In English
As part of a broader practice of soft resistance, the afternoon brings Berlin's diaspora communities, among them Indigenous peoples from the regions of Russia as well as from Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, together with voices recovering what authoritarian rule has suppressed, at a time when the isolation between these countries is growing fast.
Handle with Care makes this discursive stop at Spore out of a shared insistence on caring for one another. The project takes its name from the words stamped on fragile cargo, a reminder that what breaks easily has to be handled without force. The suitcase runs against the grain of the supply chains that carry cotton out of Uzbekistan, uranium out of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, or oil and gas out of the wider Soviet periphery. Nothing is taken away; what the suitcase holds accumulates through consent and relationship.
This Project is part of Object Oriented Democracy, curated and organized by Manana Bold e.V. with support of World Design Capital 2026. WDC 2026 is funded by the State of Hesse, the City of Frankfurt/Main and the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain.
Image: Ornaments - Mila Khatsouk (Tsey), I am an Ornament (2026).
