COLOGNE.- untame flow stay release is an exhibition and research presentation curated by Jussi Koitela and Aneta Rostkowska at Temporary Gallery in Cologne. The project is divided in two parts. that entangle each other. It features work by Ren Loren Britton, Justyna Górowska, Anke Haller, Pia Lindman, Finnegan Shannon, Cecilia Vicuña and Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen, alongside a research presentation. The exhibition architecture is by Jakob Engel.
At first glance, both the river Rhine, flowing through Cologne, and the Temporary Gallery's exhibition space appear to be different spaces – one is supposedly "natural," the other, culturally coded. Yet both are environments strongly shaped and controlled by human intervention. For centuries, the Rhine has been regulated through dams, locks, straightening, and embankments – a "tamed" river subjected to industrial, economic, and urban planning interests. Similarly, the white cube is not a neutral space, but an architecturally and institutionally constructed framework that privileges certain bodies, behaviours, and modes of perception, while excluding others.
Both spaces can become unbearable through power structures, for example, the river carries traces of industrial pollution, chemicals, and ecological exploitation, while the exhibition space often reproduces material toxicity – through plastics, solvents, synthetic paints – as well as social toxicity through physical barriers, sensory and temporal overload, and elitist access codes. In both cases, vulnerable bodies – people with disabilities, chronic illnesses, socioeconomic disadvantages, are most affected by these toxic conditions.
The exhibition is produced with artists whose practices are shaped by unjust, environmentally toxic, and ableist structures — systems that continue to suppress individuals and communities, in many times by individualizing violence and fragmenting shared experiences into isolated struggles. The project suggests how exhibition space and experience can become a situation for shared joy, recovery and repair, responding to diverse bodies and their physical and social needs and desires.
Learning from the river and disability justice movements means learning to untame — to loosen the structures that dam, hold back, engineer, discipline and control both water and bodies, and to trust in more responsive forms of movement, being and encounter. This is not simply about accommodation, but about a revolutionary and creative potential already latent in the practice of generating spaces and environments for versatile people and bodies with disabilities or chronic illness: these changes very often make worlds better for everyone — more spacious, more legible, more forgiving of different paces and different ways of being present. The effort of making lived spaces accessible, in this sense, is not a limit placed on design but a method for imagining exhibition-making otherwise - for everybody.
Pia Lindman contributes a new clay sculpture-instrument drawing on manaus — a Finnish term for a sung spell that concentrates the forces of the world to bring about change. Cast to sit on or near the water, the piece works as a sound amplifier, channeling voice and river vibration back into the riverbed itself. Collectivities Cycle: Embodied Wefts animation, brings together colours, shapes and figures as subsensorial sensations from healing sessions that artists have gone through. Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen presents a sculptural installation built from a modified wheelchair alongside the two-channel video How Great Is Your Darkness, works that counter the medical model of disability through humor and show how the world can be different. Ren Loren Britton's three-channel video installation Coalition Constellation: Constellating Reparations gathers historical and contemporary stories of successful coalition-building between disabled, trans, and other marginalized communities — including the campaign for reparations for disabled victims of the Nazi era — and reimagines the night sky's constellations through this lens of collective survival and solidarity rather than inherited, patriarchal myth.
Justyna Górowska presents a version of Hydrosex Call — an interactive virtual-reality environment in which visitors converse with an AI water nymph modeled on the artist's own body, navigating an underwater world where organic and technological forms meet to address water scarcity, pollution, and biodiversity loss. Finnegan Shannon contributes several modest, quietly radical interventions: small cat fountains filled with water from Rhein river, considering how the sound and presence of water enters domestic and disabled life; a drinking-water station offering free tap water to visitors in refillable cups, treating hydration — often overlooked as an access need, especially for disabled people in extreme heat — as a form of care built directly into the exhibition space. A clock that marks only the day of the week — its single hand completing one slow rotation every seven days — invites to experience time in a more gentle, `slower´ way. Cecilia Vicuña's film Un Nudo Vivo (The Living Knot) documents a participatory performance on a colonial-era bridge in Santiago de Chile, where passersby joined the artist in weaving unspun red wool into a collective knot, recovering memory of a river valley degraded by contamination. Anka Haller shows a series of small-format acrylic paintings that trace a young woman's transformation into a mermaid — a figure bound by rules and constraints on land who, once submerged, discovers a new dimension of freedom underwater; rendered in a representational, sometimes fragmentary style, the paintings capture this emotional passage from constraint to release, echoing the exhibition's broader interest in water as a site of liberation from imposed structure.
The exhibition is accompanied by a presentation of research that extends the project towards critical reflection on contemporary exhibitionary practices and cultural context, which often privileges sterile, universalist spaces that emphasize sight and distance while suppressing embodied, sensual experience. Drawing on Audre Lorde's notion of the erotic as a source of power, our perspective argues for exhibition environments that embrace imperfection, materiality, and the senses. Speculating on inclusive or non-toxic exhibition design, and imagining spaces that actively resist intimidation, exclusion, or alienation, and instead foster comfort, accessibility, and shared agency. Research presentation includes large group contributions from artists, curators, exhibition architects and thinkers who are radically altering the embodied conditions for art and culture through bodily sensitivities within their work and lived experiences.
The project claims that the exhibition can be a catalyst that advocates and puts into action a broader process for radical accessibility for disabled, chronically sick and marginalized communities. Ways of accessing will not only focus on accessible exhibition space and cultural production as a physical accessibility, but for larger conditions for liveable lives in our environments, for individuals and groups that are marginalised in normalised cultural production and exhibition productions.
