The exhibition series Becoming B can be understood as a public step in a process of institutional self-transformation. It accompanies and critically reflects on the ongoing transformation of Künstlerhaus Bethanien—an institution whose historically rooted name refers to its original location and its former use as a hospital. The term “Bethanien,” etymologically linked to the biblical locus of healing, is primarily shaped by the story of Lazarus, a narrative of illness, death, and resurrection. The name still alludes to this origin, even though the institution has long moved beyond this specific meaning. The progressive adoption of a new, open identity—symbolized by the unadorned letter “B”—marks a transition from a closed, historically fixed designation to a modality of open-ended potential, a symbolic gesture toward institutional reinvention.
Chapter 4 of the Becoming B series is positioned in this field of tension – between origin and reinvention, between attribution and transformation: Rachel Libeskind’s exhibition It’s Just a Matter of Attitude. Her works deal with the question of how identity, history and gender are constructed and deconstructed through visual, linguistic and cultural codes. Like the house itself in which she exhibits, the visible is scrutinized and what lies beneath is uncovered: that which is inscribed in structures, hidden in language, manifested in pictorial orders.
It’s Just a Matter of Attitude unfolds a multi-layered web of image, text, sound and material – and focuses on the subtle, often invisible mechanisms through which history and political representation are inscribed in collective narratives. Rachel Libeskind’s conceptual, multidisciplinary practice is often archive-, research- and research-based and collage-based in the broadest sense: not only visual fragments are reassembled, but also spaces of meaning, symbolic orders and media contexts. In this way, dense, contradictory spaces are created in which historical meaning circulates, but at the same time also withdraws again.
A central body of work engages photographic material drawn from 1980s U.S. hair salon catalogs. These images depict heads, read as female or male, meticulously coiffed and abstracted from bodily or contextual reference. Their origins and original function remain ambiguous: they are both functional advertising tools and silent witnesses to an aesthetic regime in which gender was communicated through hair. Presented double-sided, with both front and back of the frame exposed, the artist deliberately disrupts the photographs’ original functionality by overlaying them with typographically varied text fragments. These screen-printed excerpts derive from propaganda posters produced between 1911 and 1924, researched by the artist in the Library of Congress archives. Initially designed to recruit, mobilize, and discipline a wartime society, these texts are displaced in the artist’s intervention: estranged from their propagandistic context, they appear amplified, hyperbolic—latently sexual, aggressive, hierarchical, and insidiously normative. By imposing the semiotics of state power onto ostensibly neutral images of hair—a quotidian code deeply embedded in gendered and social norms— Rachel Libeskind exposes a binary system of social order, revealing the rigidity of normative frameworks in moments of societal tension.
The exhibition also features two large-scale collages, which function less as sequential image carriers than as spatialized loci of conceptual inquiry, wherein a central principle of Rachel Libeskind’s practice—transformation—is crystallized. In these collages, image fragments, historical remnants, and corporeal forms converge, yet their interactions resist univocal reading. Zones of friction, displacement, and overlay supplant linear narrative. Collage here functions not as a sequencing device but as a method through which form and meaning dissolve and recombine. Pictorial surfaces remain in constant flux; meaning is provisional, negotiable. The plasticity of the image mirrors the plasticity of thought: what is constructed is not only a reconfigured visual field but a new ordering of perception. Collage thus functions as both aesthetic and political apparatus, generating conditions for ambivalence, instability, and the not-yet-determined.
Transformative logics extend throughout the exhibition. A volute-like text winds along the gallery walls, evoking the temporality of a non-linear, mutable narrative. A sound intervention spills from the interior into the urban exterior, destabilizing boundaries between institution and public sphere. A centrally placed textile work invites visitors to peer through apertures functioning as the eyes of ancient statuary; those who look are also seen, becoming implicated within a system of vision that entwines historical sediment with immediate experience. Rachel Libeskind interrogates the ontology of visibility—who is seen—as well as the epistemology of observation—who is permitted to see, and under what regimes of power. Her works operate at the interstices of representation and appropriation, presence and absence, memory and manipulation. By interweaving historical iconography with subjective experience, the artist constructs conceptual space for alternative readings of “identity,” both politically and visually. The exhibition positions transition not as a terminus but as a provisional horizon, a generative site of possibility.
Text: Annabell Burger
EVENTS:
23.10.2025
19:00
Exhibition opening
20:00
Performance with Rachel Libeskind, Arel Efraim Ashbel, Colin Hacklander
14.12.2025
15:00
Performative intervention by and with Rachel Libeskind and guests
The exhibition was funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.