The collective of female artists entitled FORT (Alberta Niemann, *1982 in Bremen, and Jenny Kropp, *1978 in Frankfurt/Main; both live in Berlin) connects art and life in a special way. In a pointed perspective involving various techniques, they summon up stories of impressive intensity. Their works oscillate between humorous lightness and poetical profundity. Through subtle distortions, familiar scenes and objects from everyday life take on a surreal, sometimes uncanny character.

In her films, photographs and performances, Julika Rudelius (*1968 in Cologne, lives in 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.

The exhibition focuses on the existential dimension of coldness. What are the effects on body and psyche, on politics and social cohesion, when the temperature drops around us? Warmth is a fundamental human need, the prerequisite for feeling well and being healthy. Its absence has grave consequences: the lack of social harmony, increasing alienation, indifference or loneliness. But what does it mean when the social climate cools down? How can we react to politically frosty times?

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.