Page 7 — Cruising Curators

Cruising Curators

About Us

Cruising is a practice that can take shape in different forms. It could be sailing about without a precise destination or wandering and waiting if someone makes eye contact. It could be driven by sexual stimulation or merely by curiosity and the need for dialogue.
The coincidental, ephemeral and yet meaningful encounters serve as an extension of knowledge-production, reflection and learning together: Cruising Curators is an open invitation to think, act, recollect, fuse and circulate together with our communities-to-be.

A space for intertwining intercommunal curatorial practices is initiated by a group of cultural workers who are in search of a continuous tale of interactions, bringing spontaneous hunches, instants and stories from theory, fiction and daily spheres into artistic practices, which aren’t necessarily bound to a physical manifestation of an end product. Adopting cruising and crossing paths within our urban jumble as a research method, the goal is to initiate different forms of contact through the curatorial. In response to the world’s fast-paced and consuming setting, slow methodologies are used, allowing long-term exercises and in-depth discussions to unfold organically.
The collective started off as a working group of the 11th Berlin Biennale’s Curatorial Workshop How now to gather and is currently constituted by: Bengisu Çağlayan, Raphael Daibert, Luise Leon Elbern, Eirini Fountedaki, Viviane Tabach and Sarnt Utamachote.

Contact

cruisingcurators@gmail.com

Founding Members

Bengisu Çağlayan (she/her) is a curator and cultural worker practising within the realms of curatorial research, artistic collaboration methodologies, (non-)institutional partnerships and fundraising for the arts. Mainly interested in debates on ‘the moving body’ and the experience of choreographic phenomena, Çağlayan combines research and practice that address the isolated and collective psyche of subjugated bodies. She received a research scholarship from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe in 2023.
Çağlayan currently works at the Berlin Biennale, and is the co-founder of STRÜKTÜR e.V., a non-profit organization for situated and diasporic artistic production and imagination from Turkey.
Keeping a second base in her native Istanbul, Çağlayan worked for the Istanbul Biennial since 2016 while undertaking additional roles for the Pavilion of Turkey at the International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. She writes regularly for the bimonthly magazine Sanat Dünyamız. Çağlayan holds a BA in Arts and Cultural Management from Istanbul Bilgi University and completed an Erasmus exchange program at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. bengisucaglayan.com

Raphael Daibert (he/him) is a Brazilian curator, artist, and researcher based in Berlin. He holds a Master's in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute (2018-2020). He is a founding member of Lanchonete.org (2013-2018), an artist-run cultural platform in the centre of São Paulo. He is part of the project Third Space, an artistic-pedagogical project founded as part of "Gruppendynamik - Der Blaue Reiter und Kollektive der Moderne" at the Lenbachhaus. His practice mainly focuses on collective anti-hegemonic art projects that attempt to combat the existing forces of oppression. Daibert is currently a PhD student and research assistant at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

Luise Leon Elbern (she/her) is an architect and urban designer, who studied at Universidade de São Paulo and at Technical University Munich. In addition to her work as an architect and planner, she has been working as research assistant at TUM and was exhibition mediator at the German Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia in 2018. In 2021, Luise was an INITIAL scholarship holder at the Akademie der Künste. She is currently studying Art in Context at UdK and is also a co-founder of the multidisciplinary collective CollColl e.V., which pursues interventions and participatory sites in public space. They have been part of IBA Thüringen, IBA Stuttgart and have been invited to the Eco Solidarity Fair by the Goethe-Institut NYC.

Eirini Fountedaki (she/her) is a curator and writer based in Berlin and Athens. She co-curated the film- screening series Residing in the Borderlands at SAVVY Contemporary—The Laboratory of Form- Ideas (2019-2020), which intended to create a new cartography of Berlin through diasporic perspectives. She is the co-editor of the publication How does the world breathe now? and has co-curated for exhibitions and festivals such as 15th Forum Expanded, Berlinale and London Short Film Festival (2020). She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory (Goldsmiths, University of London) and is currently a curatorial fellow of ARTWORKS (Athens). As SAHA Studio's Curatorial Fellow (2022), she researched the intersection of activism and feminism in Istanbul, where she pursued her research on feminist artistic practices in the Mediterranean region.

Viviane Tabach (she/her) is a Brazilian curator and art mediator based in Berlin. Her work centers on educational methods within curatorial and artistic practices. Viviane’s research delves into what makes art institutions effective learning spaces and how the public can be better integrated into this context. She has co-founded and co-directed the art space Casa Aberta in São Paulo, where she organized transdisciplinary projects that integrated music, dance, visual arts, and other forms of expression. She was an art mediator (sobat) for documenta fifteen (2022). She is an MA student in Art in Context at UdK and has a postgraduate degree in Art: Criticism and Curatorship from Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo and a Teaching Practice and BA of Visual Arts from the Instituto de Artes da Universidade Estadual Paulista.

Sarnt Utamachote (they/them) is a filmmaker and curator. They are a co-founder of collective un.thai.tled, through which they curated un.thai.tled Film Festival Berlin (2019-) as well as Beyond the kitchen: Stories from the Thai Park (2020). Their video installation I Am Not Your Mother was officially exhibited at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and nominated for R.D. Pestonji Award for Best Thai Short Film at Thai Short Film and Video Festival Bangkok 2020. They are the 2020 recipient of Queer Short FIlm Fund from Xposed Queer Film Festival Berlin. sarntutamachote.com

Former Members

Nuno de Brito Rocha (2020–2021)

Dissident Paths: Traces
(Three-day public program, exhibition and publication)
neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK)
with ReRouting

nGbK work group: Clementine Butler-Gallie, Bengisu Çağlayan, Raphael Daibert, Luise Leon Elbern, Eirini Fountedaki, Viviane Tabach

visit ngbk.de for the full program.

Contributors: Lucía Alfaro Valencia, Yasmeen Al-Qaisi, Elena Biserna, Mirja Busch, Rüzgâr Buşki, Esquina Caliente, Suelen Calonga, Saverio Cantoni & Dana Cermane, Gabriel Francisco Lemos, Carolin Genz, Jane Hwang, Mahshid Mahboubifar, Pol Merchan & Sarah Martinus, Harun Morrison, Pitchaya Ngamcharoen, Marlene Oeken & Martha Schwindling, Minh Duc Pham, Liz Rosenfeld, Natthapong Samakkaew, Kaspar Schmidt Mumm, Nour Sokhon, Lauryn Youden, Alternative Monument, hand breast heart kollektiv, House’ it going? (Laura Margarete Bertelt & Uli Kneisl), Project In/Visibility (Samirah Siddiqui & Tasnim Elboute), ssssSssssssss (Ashkan Sepahvand & virgil b/g taylor)

Walk Notations
Eds.: Eirini Fountedaki, work group Dissident Paths, nGbK, Berlin, 2026
Softcover with flaps and thread binding, 10 x 15,5 cm
256 pages, 3 colors, numerous ill.
Retail price: 14,00 €
ISBN: 978-3-949969-06-5
Order here.

Design: Paula Buškevica

Concluding Dissident Paths, the three-day program TRACES brings together different artistic traces through the formats of an installation, workshops, performances and collective meals, foregrounding live contributions as well as the Walk Notations publication launch.
The year-long curatorial project Dissident Paths: Walking Together as a Method unfolded through artistic walking practices across Berlin—from Tempelhof to Wedding, Spandau to Lichtenberg, Tiergarten to Hellersdorf, and Moabit to Marzahn. Between May and October 2025, different parts of the city were traversed with 23 inclusive walks led by invited artists and collectives, across five chapters titled PATHS. From each walk, the contributors were invited to leave a TRACE—whether through documentation, material-making or textual reflections.
The publication Walk Notations brings some of these traces together. Moving between artistic practices, curatorial conversations, and reflections, the book approaches walking as a method for being together in public space. Some contributions revisit specific sites or gestures while others move further afield, driven by personal memory, archival research, theoretical analysis, or speculative fiction. Conceived as a portable companion, Walk Notations invites the readers to navigate the city otherwise—attentive to detours, thresholds, and the possibilities that emerge when paths are made collectively.
The publication launch commences the three-day program TRACES, which condenses last year’s walks, and during which many of the participating artists further develop the traces they collected: On each day, workshops with Rüzgâr Buşki give visitors the opportunity to make their own screen print to complement their copy of Walk Notations; and collective meals with Yasmeen Al-Qaisi invite the audience to break fast with assortments of grains and stories.
On Friday, a sound performance by Nour Sokhon translates collective fieldwork into a performative score; Saverio Cantoni’s and Dana Cermane’s performance interprets spoken words and sonic improvisation into sign language; and Mahshid Mahboubifar addresses police violence in a film-essay.
In a clay workshop facilitated by Marlene Oeken & Martha Schwindling on Saturday, the participants will exchange experiences and thoughts on material memory culture and try to make monuments from the past, present, and future visible and tangible. Suelen Calonga’s workshop explores the limits of critical thinking as the dominant language of reflection in art and cultural institutions. The Alternative Monument collective asks what a monument to migration might be, who it is for, and what it can carry into the future. Artists Ashkan Sepahvand and virgil b/g taylor, who together form the collective ssssSssssssss, will reflect on their walk in an informal couch-conversation.
Also on Saturday, a reading performance by Liz Rosenfeld explores cruising beyond its homonormative structures, and as a mode of thinking with the body while communicating through sexuality. Through poetry, movement, and sound, hand breast heart kollektiv‘s performance takes the audience on a cathartic journey propelled by the energy of collective healing and the promise of a new future. In a performative reading, Gabriel Francisco Lemos explores mushrooms not only as biological organisms, but as teachers of attention, impermanence, and entanglement. The program ends with a DJ set by Esquina Caliente to celebrate the paths walked and new paths opened.
Parallel walk-throughs for children and adults will be led through the space of TRACES, at times intersecting in playful overlap, turning walking together into a method for mediation.
Across the three-day program some of the participating artists are sharing physical traces from their walks in the form of a collective installation, integrated with research material from the curators’ library.