What can a body tell us without using words?

With Bodies that Speak, Haus. Kunst. Mitte. explores one of the oldest subjects in art and, at the same time, a theme of immediate contemporary relevance: the human body. Following the successful exhibition Faces of Mind, the institution once again brings together a group of outstanding women artists, turning its attention to the many ways in which bodies can be represented, experienced, and reimagined.

Seventeen women artists from four generations are at the heart of the exhibition. All live and work in Berlin and engage intensively with corporeality in their artistic practices. Many are important voices of their respective generations and have exhibited internationally. Their backgrounds are diverse: the artists come from, among other places, Iran, China, the United States, Turkey, Poland, Japan, and Germany. What connects them is not a shared artistic school, but the city in which they live and their sustained engagement with the body as a means of artistic expression.

Berlin becomes a space of exchange. For decades, the city has attracted artists from all over the world while also serving as a place where different ways of life, cultural backgrounds, and artistic positions converge. Bodies that Speak makes this diversity visible and, in particular, gives space to women artists who are shaping Berlin’s art scene today.

The female body is at the centre of the exhibition – but not as an isolated subject. Birth, sexuality, coming of age, illness, ageing, and death are part of human life. At the same time, these experiences are shaped differently by gender roles, social expectations, and cultural constructs. The works on view make these tensions visible, moving from deeply personal images and stories towards questions that reach far beyond the female experience.

Here, the body is much more than a depicted subject. It becomes material, tool, medium, and a carrier of memory and meaning. The performative runs throughout the exhibition: even where no performance takes place, painting, photographing, shaping, or manipulating are physical acts. Bodies “speak” through posture and movement, surface and material, presence and absence.

The exhibition unfolds across 20 rooms and follows five thematic chapters. Beginning with imaginary and dreamlike worlds of the body, it moves through themes of life and nature towards social and personal pressures. In the final chapter, familiar boundaries dissolve as bodies enter into hybrid relationships with the organic, the animal, the technological, and the cosmic. The exhibition does not tell a linear story or offer definitive answers. Vulnerability can be connected to agency just as resistance can be connected to care, transformation to loss, or dissolution to a new beginning.

Bodies that Speak invites us to consider the body not as a fixed form, but as something fluid, contradictory, and continually changing – and to allow the different voices of the artists themselves to speak.

Participating Artists : Nevin Aladağ · Laura Bruce · Carina Chang · Lunita Juli Dorn · Carola Ernst · Leiko Ikemura · Aneta Kajzer · Franziska Klotz · Sarah Loibl · Nanne Meyer · Jana Sophia Nolle · May Parlar · Bettina Pousttchi · Barbara Quandt · Jenny Rempel · Alma Sinai · Andrea Zaumseil