The ICI Berlin is closed till 9 January 2026 for winter recess. We will resume our public activities with the new term, starting on 12 January 2025.

We thank our fellows, staff, associates, cooperation partners, and all the friends of the ICI Berlin and wish everyone healthy and joyful winter days and a happy new year 2026!

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This group exhibition focuses on everyday objects and the notion of scale in the visual realm. It presents photographic works as well as paintings and drawings, exploring questions of proportion, size, and zoom effects to consider the social, political, and aesthetic implications of scale in daily experience.

With works by Filippo Bosco, Christoph Breuer, Delfina Cabrera, Neta Choli-Avidan, Y. Ariadne Collins, Yuri Di Liberto, Sarath Jakka, Claudia Peppel, Jasmine Pisapia, Silke Schwarz, Verónica Stedile Luna, and Anna R. Winder.

Opening Hours:
Wednesday and Thursday: 14:00 – 18:00
Friday: 14:00-17:00
From 19 Dec - 2 Jan by appointment only.

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‘Shock and awe’ is typically a state of reduced capacity to act, move, or resist. Under very special conditions it can be experienced as vitalizing, but in the current conjuncture, it is most readily associated with military or terrorist strategies directed at foreign enemies or, more startingly, turned inward in the hands of disaster capitalism and aspiring autocrats. The effect of dumbfounding paralysis is even more potent with actions that appear themselves self-destructive: when subjects wilfully demolish what used to secure their prestige and power; when rising authoritarian regimes are supported in anticipatory obedience; or when climate change seems to be deliberately accelerated through escalating arms and technology races. How can one not feel utterly disoriented, when it seems as if the world is so clearly oriented towards its own destruction?

Interested applicants should read the announcement on www.ici-berlin.org/fellowships-announcement.

Application deadline:
5 January 2026, 14:00 (CET)

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Seit dem 19. Jahrhundert sind Radikalität und Populärkultur keine Gegensätze mehr. Weder ist die eine nur permissiv und integrativ noch die andere ausschließlich rigide und elitär. Stattdessen lösen sich die klassischen Gegensätze zugunsten eines neuen Zusammenspiels auf. Spätestens seit Jeremy Bentham im Jahr 1832 in London seine »Auto-Ikonifizierung« durchsetzte, stiftet die Verbindung aus Radikalität und Populärkultur eine neue Form von Egalität und sozialem Ausgleich, die quer zur Figur der sozialen Beschämung steht. 

Elke Schmitter diskutiert mit Mirjam Schaub über die Bedeutung und den Wandel von Radikalität und Radikalisierung in Philosophie, Kunst, Politik und Gesellschaft.

Die Veranstaltung ist eine Kooperation der HAW Hamburg, dem Felix Meiner Verlag und dem ICI Berlin.

Registration opens on 5 January 2026.

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The symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy: ‘To Give Body to an Institution’ explores Frantz Fanon’s political, clinical, and aesthetic approach to institutions along three interrelated lines. First, it delves into the impact of Saint-Alban on Fanon’s conception of madness and the institution as both in need of a cure and capable of curing — a sociogenic and phenomenological perspective attentive to embodiment, subjectivity, and history. Second, it turns to his work at Blida-Joinville and Charles-Nicolle, where colonial alienation thwarted the implementation of social therapy, yet where Fanon and his collaborators experimented with media, spatial, and aesthetic practices to propose new forms of collective life.

Organized by Camilla Caglioti, Marlon Miguel, and Elena Vogman as part of the Research project ’Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe‘ (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, funded by Freigeist Fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation) in collaboration with ICI Berlin

Registration opens on 14 January 2026.

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Das Buch trans* Werden. Queere Zeitlichkeiten und Transitionen in Videoblogs widmet sich in einer medienwissenschaftlichen Analyse ausgewählten Videos von trans* Videobloggern, die ihre geschlechtlichen Transitionen in den 2010er Jahren auf YouTube dokumentieren. In selbstdokumentarischen Praktiken verbunden mit den Wirkungen des Testosterons auf die Körper offenbart sich trans* Sein als ein komplexes und ungewisses Werden, das in medialer Umgebung als queere Zeitlichkeit erfahrbar wird. Hierbei stehen die Effekte der Mediatisierung im Fokus der Analyse.

ISBN 978-3-96558-111-1 | Hardcover | 37.5 EUR
ISBN 978-3-96558-112-8 | Paperback | 20.5 EUR

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Published in 1992, Teodolinda Barolini’s The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante was a clarion call for a paradigmatic shift in reading Dante’s Commedia. Bringing together an international cadre of scholars, A World of Possibilities: The Legacy of ‘The Undivine Comedy’ illustrates the generative influence that Barolini’s approach has exerted across continents, disciplines, and generations. It testifies to the variety of interpretations that originate in her method, and opens new perspectives on Dante’s oeuvre and the significance of literature.

ISBN 978-3-96558-107-4 | Hardcover | 39 EUR
ISBN 978-3-96558-108-1 | Paperback | 21.5 EUR

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