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.
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
Discussion with Lilit Matevosyan, Mila Khatsouk (Tsey), and Irina Denkmann on recovering Adyghe memories and methodology of giving a voice to what is sliding away.
In Russian and English
15:30–16:30
Film Screening
"Dreams of Present" (2024),
Rusudan Mirobzalova, (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).
