fragile currents brings together thirteen artworks from regions shaped by technological asymmetries and extractive practices. Spread across the three exhibition halls of the Akademie der Künste, they are connected by the Archival Stations, which bring together wider sets of practices and ideas from transmediale’s history. At the centre, the installation Ruined Assembly serves as a public space to meet and spend time, featuring research and mappings created through the collective efforts of researchers and cultural institutions.
The exhibition is open throughout the festival until 7 March, with a gathering of institutions and initiatives to map counter-infrastructures at the start of the exhibition. A two-day closing programme co-curated with MOST Magazine will take place at the end of February.
Opening | 27 Jan |
Exhibition Dates | 28 Jan – 7 Mar |
Ruined Assembly Gathering | 28 Jan |
Closing Programme | 26 – 27 Feb |
fragile currents asks not what transmediale remembers,
but what transmediale can do.
The exhibition unfolds around the idea of fragility, which permeates our present moment: unstable infrastructures, technological asymmetries, unequal dependencies, and vulnerable bodies. Accepting fragility as a condition of interdependency opens the possibility to build counter-infrastructures. At the centre of fragile currents is the idea of holding tension: between exploitation and resistance, asymmetry and cooperation. Much like an electric current, where a difference in potential generates a flow, fragile currents emerges from differences that remain unresolved.
To mark the 40th anniversary of transmediale, the exhibition also works with the festival’s archive: not simply as data stored on a computer or material sitting on a shelf, but a circulation within our present currents, available to be politically reactivated.
Archival Stations
Ruined Assembly
School of Algorithmic Solidarity
Marking its 40th anniversary, transmediale RFC 40 presents a festival and an exhibition. Curated by Barbara Cueto and under the title groundstates , the festival’s programme will take place during the last week of January 2027 in silent green Kulturquartier. The exhibition fragile currents is curated by Antonina Stebur and will be on show at the Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg) until March.