Spaces of Freedom

“You had a lot of draft-dodgers here and it was cheap. I had a huge loft for very little money on Dresdener Straße in Kreuzberg. In the 70s, there was a very creative crowd here.”

— Esther Friedman

In the 1970s and 1980s, Kreuzberg became an experimental stage where questions of identity could constantly be renegotiated. Artists used performative practices and other methods to develop counter-narratives to racist and sexist stereotypes. Through these practices, the artists also responded to West German debates on migration that focused not only on origin but also on visible markers such as clothing, body type, demeanour and perceived gender attribution. These criteria determined who was viewed as “assimilated”, “modern”, “traditional”, “dangerous”, or “desirable”. For instance, the headscarf worn by some female labour migrants was condemned as an expression of patriarchal oppression, including by segments of the white feminist movement.

At the same time, Kreuzberg saw the emergence of spaces where diverse groups pushed past the narrow limits of societal expectations. Squatted buildings, self-organised cafés and meeting places for lesbians, gays, punks and anarchists created subcultural realms where migrants and non-migrants intersected. Although social hierarchies and stereotypes persisted in these spaces, clothing, gender and desire could be negotiated differently. They fostered a sense of belonging and gave rise to new societal visions and artistic forms of expression, which laid the groundwork for queer migrant self empowerment in Kreuzberg in the decades that followed.

Eduardo Arroyo

Kreuzberger Sonntag (Sunday in Kreuzberg)

(1976)

Broad shoulders, a narrow waist and a tie blowing in the wind – the wall object Kreuzberger Sonntag evokes an elegant Sunday outfit from the 1970s. Consisting of black rubber, the work also tells another story: the industrial material, mass-produced on assembly lines, is typically used for flooring, notably in the now closed Tegel airport, a space of transit and arrival for many people from all over the world. Eduardo Arroyo created this work while living in exile. He left Spain in 1958 to protest Franco’s fascist dictatorship. After being officially expelled in 1974, he lived as a stateless person in Paris until the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program brought him to Germany a year later. There, his focus shifted to the many migrants who had been recruited as labourers to the city. In Kreuzberger Sonntag, their harsh working reality blends with the desire for moments of carefree leisure.

Kreuzberg: Kunst und Migration seit 1960, installation view, Gropius Bau, 2026

Nuray Demir

Yellow, richly decorated fabric canopy on a frame; chairs and vase with flowers underneath.

Kreuzberg: Kunst und Migration seit 1960, installation view, Gropius Bau, 2026

Gossip Girls

2026

Gossip Girls by Nuray Demir explores queer and post-migrant art and culture histories in Kreuzberg and West Berlin. The installation, composed of draped fabric, stackable white Monobloc chairs and ephemeral elements such as wilting roses, evokes the “aftermath” of a past event or party. The stories and accounts of influential figures in the cultural scene become audible against this backdrop, offering a transgenerational perspective on queer and post-migrant event series such as Gayhane and Salon Oriental in 1990s Berlin.

The work foregrounds gossip as a collective and subversive practice: a form of knowledge that circulates among speakers, listeners and those who are the subject of conversation. Gossip requires no evidence, only repetition – and through repetition, it becomes legend. In this way, the scene writes its own chronicle, on its own terms and on nobody’s behalf. The work points to the lack of institutional support for marginalised artistic practices that played a formative role in Kreuzberg’s cultural life, yet remained largely absent from established funding structures, exhibitions and archives.

Colette Lumiere

Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes (Art Under the Yorckbrücken)

1985

Colette Lumiere is known for her interdisciplinary approach. Since the early 1970s, she has interwoven performances and installations in public spaces with drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography and her so-called “Living Environments” – room-filling fabric installations, some of which she inhabited for several weeks. In 1978, the artist staged her supposed death at the Whitney Museum in New York City and subsequently assumed various fictional identities. At the invitation of the DAAD, she came to Berlin in 1984, where she developed the character of Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes. This persona is based on the biography of the Dutch dancer Mata Hari (artist name of Margaretha Geertruida Zelle), who was sentenced to death for espionage in 1917. The work on display refers to a performance in which the artist walked along the Berlin Wall carrying a sack of golden potatoes. The potato, a stereotypical term for Germans, became a recurring motif in her Berlin series of work.

An abstract installation with a painting depicting a distorted human figure and a bowl of golden objects.

Colette Lumiere, Billboard, Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes (Art Under the Yorckbrücken), 1985, courtesy: the artist and Company Gallery, New York

Metin Talayman

Surreal painting featuring multiple creatures, figures, and abstract forms. The composition is divided into a lighter and a darker half.

Metin Talayman, Oranienstraße, 1981

Oranienstraße

(1981)

The hints of old building facades in Metin Talayman’s paintings evoke the Kreuzberg of the 1980s. At that time, the neighbourhood was located on the edge of West Berlin and still marked by the traces of war. Oranienstraße, which lends its name to the work, was simultaneously a residential area, a workplace, a shopping district, a hub for political organising and a cultural stage for migrant workers. Due to the low cost of living, older generations, young people from the punk and squatter scenes and migrant families lived together in cramped quarters – though the latter often lived in lower-quality housing or paid higher rents due to discrimination and a lack of necessary information. Talayman worked with spiral-shaped lines, which in his work symbolise dissolution and alienation. The figures depicted thus become ghostly beings, hinting at precarious living conditions on the margins of society.