Between Threshold and Future (Zwischen Tür und Zukunft)

The exhibition emerges from a Curatorial Lab where seven participants imagined different futures through artistic and somatic practices. From their conversations, movements, and sounds arose images of closeness, ambiguity, and longing – now present as fragments that resonate throughout the installation.

Kim Diana Vu’s interactive sound installation, Sustained Vacillation – Responsive System, transforms the audience’s presence into a living soundscape: every body, movement, and pause becomes part of a composition that can never be predicted or repeated. Visitors shape the work simply by being in the space: their warmth, proximity, and gestures modulating layers of resonance. Gentle harmonies and distorted frequencies flow and clash, manifesting belonging and uncertainty at once.

Arin Ismail translates the acoustic experience into the visual realm, in Repeat. Footage of water evokes calm and reflection, while images shift between intimacy and overwhelm, resonance and silence. Projected from multiple sources, the visuals are fragmented and sometimes distorted, tilting from closeness to distance and creating a space where the self encounters its own ambivalence.

Zwischen Tür und Zukunft holds space for a shared – though differently lived – history of migration and displacement. It invites reflection on how the ongoing questions of staying, leaving, and belonging continue to shape lives and futures in Germany today – especially for those who face racism and/or antisemitism and must constantly reimagine where safety can be found. 

Curatorial Vision 

Developed by curators Diane Izabiliza and Saida-Mahalia Saad, the project grew out of a desire to move beyond a sense of powerlessness and to connect with others. It exceeds the scope of a conventional exhibition, acting as a collective space of experience that connects aesthetic awareness with social urgency.

The curators write: “These questions are not abstract to us. They trouble our own lives, and we do not have the answers, nor do we wish to rush toward them. Instead, we hope to create a moment to breathe: to pause alone and together, to recognize common longings, and to feel unexpected closeness emerge where it is most needed. We invite you to pause, to remain still, or to move and speak within the space, whatever feels right. Above all, we ask you to take this moment of reflection as a quiet act of refusal: a way of stepping outside polarized debates, and of approaching the questions before you on your own terms.” 

An accompanying program of music, readings, dance, and discussion expands upon the installation, inviting visitors to linger and engage in conversation. This serves as a gesture of shared solidarity at a time when security has become a contested resource.