Towards the end of my residency at ZK/U Berlin in August 2021, I presented my work in the form of a studio exhibition, ‘The Late Museum’, which considered the city’s recently opened Humboldt Forum.

Located on a highly contested site that formerly hosted the Palace of the Republic – the modernist East German parliament building and cultural space – and housed within a partially reconstructed Berliner Schloss – a nineteenth century Prussian palace – the Humboldt Forum offered new ways of assessing museums’ relationship and responsibility to the city.

Its controversial launch coincided with a wider awakening of Germany’s historic colonial role, and the contemporary inequalities present in German society.

In the exhibition I contended that the institution was producing a form of ‘performative criticality’ through its communications and spatial design.

The intention was to create a visible dialogue between the institution and the critique on newly democratised terms. The images, video, found objects and texts, highlight the failings and limitations of institutional self-critique, and present it as a performative act.

The exhibition formed part of ‘Reset’, the 2021 edition of the Ortstermin Kunstfestival Moabit.