With a total of over 200 works by 100 artists and groups from different times and contexts, there are plenty of discoveries to be made in the collection exhibition The Way We Are. Thematic areas extending over 2,500 square meters formulate a multiplicity of different statements from the 1960s to the present day.

In various languages and with different emphases, Michaela Mélian’s (*1956, lives near Munich) acoustic work lays out the diverse, in some cases contradictory meanings of the German verb aufheben which serves as its title. The multiple meanings of the single verb aufheben indicate the possibility of revealing various delimitations and contradictory standpoints and of transcending them in such a way as to open up new perspectives in thought and action.

In her films, photographs and performances, Julika Rudelius (*1968 in Cologne, lives in the Netherlands/Amsterdam) is moved by curiosity to investigate people, stereotypes and milieus that she does not (yet) know and that in most cases are quite different from what she would have thought before. The desire to plunge into these realities and to seek out their contradictions, aesthetics and functional modes marks her artistic output on both the contentual and formal levels.

Coldness is understood as low temperatures outside as well as emotionlessness, missing empathy, and a lack of solidarity. In this context, coldness can become a means of artistic expression for depicting and criticizing social conditions. Warmth is a fundamental human need, the prerequisite for health and well-being. Its absence has devastating consequences: a lack of social cohesion, increasing alienation, states of indifference and loneliness, acts of violence.

The exhibition presents the multimedia oeuvre of the artists’ collective Die Tödliche Doris. It is the first comprehensive survey show dedicated to the group, which was active from 1980–1987. Die Tödliche Doris arose to equal degree in the surroundings of the punk movement and amid the art academy in West Berlin. Structured as an artists’ collective, it worked conceptually with various media in the areas of music, performance, video, painting, object art and literature. In particular, it repeatedly put to question our habits of seeing and hearing.