by Johanna Siegler // June 2, 2025
“This is my traffic over the night / and how / should I range my pride / each oceanic morning…” So begins Frank O’Hara’s ‘Walking to Work’ (1952), spiralling through the city in a queered motion between dislocation and declaration. “I’m becoming / the street / Who are you in love with? / me? / Straight against the light I cross,” he writes, letting pride, flirtation and tired joy pool in the gutters of the morning street. This summer in Berlin, O’Hara’s sentiment hums again, low and electric, harmonizing with the underground’s looping murmur. ‘Kunst im Untergrund 2024/25: flexen, flirren, fantasieren – mapping the queer city’ turns three stations along the U2 line into an atlas of queer histories and futures. Opening June 28th with a grand kickoff at U-Bhf Bülowstraße, the festival transforms platforms and passageways into a canvas for alternative trajectories of movement.
Franziska Pierwoss & Siska: ‘Soundtrax for a Bazaar,’ Museumsstraßenbahn Bülowstraße // © BVG-Archiv
Berlin’s U-Bahn elevated tracks and tunnels have long harbored hidden worlds in transit. In a city where official maps once split East from West and privilege from marginality, the underground art intervention loosens the stitching of the official grid to let other paths breathe through. As the curators note, the modern metropolis was largely designed around the single archetype of a “man in a company car on his way to work.” Western urban planning catered to upper-class white cis men, leaving women, queer folks, people of color and others to adapt to structures never meant for them. ‘Mapping the queer city’ reimagines Berlin’s transit map in conversation with its queer nuclei, drawing on the lineages of dissenting spatial practices and channeling the spirits of those who have always remapped the city for themselves. This gesture belongs to a longer history. Founded in East Berlin in 1958 as ‘Kunst statt Werbung,’ Kunst im Untergrund began as a competition around posters for peace that were shown on platform billboards at U Alexanderplatz. Unlike many GDR institutions, it endured after reunification, today continued by the nGbK as a site for public art.
At U-Bhf Bülowstraße, artist duo Franziska Pierwoss & Siska resurrect the ghost of the Turkish Bazaar that sprang up on disused train tracks from 1978 to 1991. Their project ‘Soundtrax for a Bazaar, also known as $on’ny Music’ presents large-format billboards and a limited-edition release tape to conjure the era’s lively tape culture, while a free live concert on opening night turns the station’s underbelly into a space for communal celebration. In the shadow of the glassy Sony Music headquarters above, this intervention pointedly reclaims public space to revive the grassroots communal friction that once defined Bülowstraße. At U-Bhf Nollendorfplatz, historically the heart of Berlin’s queer community, Adrian Marie Blount stakes out space for Black queer care. Blount’s billboard collage ‘Basics of Care’ invites commuters to pause and engage in the recentering of Black queer love and softness in a place that, like so many urban sites, can be inhospitable to intersecting identities. Throughout July, Blount orchestrates subtle, durational performances of affection between Black queer bodies amidst the station’s bustle.
Adrian Marie Blount: ‘Basics of Care’ // © Adrian Marie Blount
Moving along the U2 line, the festival foregrounds those who boldly occupy public space today. Lola von der Gracht’s ‘We Are Everywhere’ splashes billboard portraits and floor graphics across Bülowstraße and Schönhauser Allee stations, bridging past and present trans lives. By linking trailblazing trans figures from 1899-1969 with trans individuals in Berlin now, these images and live performances scheduled in July, transform mundane transit halls into an homage to trans resilience, addressing both historical erasure and the ongoing challenges trans people face in public space.
Later in the season, Nadin Reschke’s ‘Lila Fetzen’ (Purple Scraps), installed at U Schönhauser Allee, reaches back 35 years after 1989/90 to commemorate the unofficial East German women movements, especially the Lila Offensive, founded in Prenzlauer Berg in the late 1980s. Using archival photographs as a point of departure, Reschke initiates a search for solidarity-based gestures of resistance and for the visibility of contemporary queer life. In a collective performance set in urban space, the resistance of the 1980s is revisited against the backdrop of today’s urban conditions. Textile banners, handmade costumes and speech acts bring the unrealized demands of that era into the present, asking what scraps can be gathered, worn and voiced anew to meet today’s injustices. The festival culminates in September with Ipek Burçak’s ‘In Berlin Nichts Neues’ (In Berlin Nothing New), where the artist extends Bülowstraße’s post-migrant narrative. Drawing on 1990s anti-fascist zines published by Berlin’s Turkish and migrant communities, Burçak’s billboards and photo-novel-style text installations weave archival voices into the present. A reading performance on the station platform will give life to these printed words, amplifying the knowledge forged here and suggesting that beneath the concrete, a frayed but enduring fabric of resistance has been tugging at the surface all along.
Lola von der Gracht: ‘We Are Everywhere’ // © Lola von der Gracht
From the queer social networks of yesteryear’s Nollendorfplatz to the ad-hoc bazaar, Berlin has always contained multitudes unseen on official maps. ‘flexen, flirren, fantasieren – mapping the queer city’ brings those histories into fluorescent light, stretching a ribbon of queer cartography along the U2 line. Inviting passersby to ride a circuit of reimagination and memory, the works here move against sanctioned flows. In these interstices, new paths to belonging flicker into being, ‘cross straight into the light,’ urging Berlin to flex, flit and fantasize about itself once more.
Festival Info
Kunst im Untergrund
Exhibition: June 28–Sept. 20, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 28, 2025; 5–10pm
flexen-flirren-fantasieren-en.ngbk.de
U-Bülowstraße, 10783 Berlin, click here for map
U-Nollendorfplatz, 10787 Berlin, click here for map
U-Schönhauser Allee, 10439 Berlin, click here for map
