Due to renewed interest in feminism, the resulting shifts in cultural and social norms, and the expansion of debates on power, consent, care, and emotional labor, archetypal models of masculinity are being destabilized. The resulting post-patriarchal situation creates space for their transformation and the search for alternative conceptions of masculinity. The exhibition under construction: post-patriarchal spaces of (un)certainty draws attention to the multifaceted nature of masculinity and its constant shaping within a network of relationships between individual experience, cultural norms, and the material environment. Here, identity takes the form of an assemblage—a shifting arrangement of heterogeneous elements in which social, material, and symbolic flows intertwine, merge, and separate to give rise to new forms.

The exhibited works by nine young contemporary artists reveal the tension between normative notions of masculinity and the multiplicity of its lived experiences. The archetype of the male hero, the imperative of performance, dominance, and the endless desire for success clash with the fragility of existence and the reality of expectations embedded in lived experience. Public space, the home, and family relationships preserve traces of hierarchical structures, inequalities, and roles passed down across generations. Fragments of memory, nature marked by human presence, material imprints, migration, and anonymity redefine the boundaries of identity and belonging. The exhibition engages in a dialogue with these distinct thematic clusters and itself creates an assemblage of its own kind, in which individual artistic positions touch upon, permeate, and interact with one another. Masculinity is revealed here as an inherently relational, necessarily unfinished process of becoming, composition, and inquiry. Its exploration therefore develops inseparably through a dialogue with the feminist reevaluation of power relations, corporeality, and the possibilities of subjectivity.

The exhibition is curated by: Martin Nitsche, Nataša Hand