COLOGNE.- untame flow stay release presents artistic practices undertaken in response to unjust, environmentally toxic, and ableist structures—systems that continue to suppress individuals and communities, often by individualizing violence and fragmenting shared experiences into isolated struggles.
The project envisions exhibition space and its experience as a situation for shared joy, recovery, and repair, attentive to diverse bodies, and their physical and social needs, as well as desires. In order to extend the artworks into speculation about future non-toxic and accessible spaces, the exhibition is paired with a research presentation, detox access spaces, bringing together contributions from artists, curators, exhibition architects, and thinkers working on inclusive, non-toxic exhibition design.
The exhibition's architecture by Jakob Engel, entangles artists' works, research contributions, and structures for staying and gathering, allowing artworks, materiality, bodies, and knowledge to flow with each other.
At first glance, both the river Rhine, flowing through Cologne, and the Temporary Gallery's exhibition space appear to be different spaces—one 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, behaviors, and modes of perception while excluding others.
Each can become unbearable through power structures: the river carries traces of industrial pollution, chemicals, and ecological exploitation. The exhibition space often reproduces material toxicity—through plastics, solvents, synthetic paints—as well as social toxicity through physical barriers, sensory overload, and elitist access codes. In both cases, vulnerable bodies—people with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and socioeconomic disadvantages—are most affected by these conditions.
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. Making lived spaces accessible, in this sense, is not a limit placed on design but a radical method for imagining exhibition-making otherwise—for everybody.
The artworks respond to these challenges in ingenious ways. Pia Lindman contributes a clay sculpture-instrument, drawing on "manaus"—a Finnish term for a sung spell that concentrates the forces of the world—which is meant to sit near the water as a sound amplifier, channeling voice and river vibration into the riverbed. The artwork is presented together with a related animation gathering colours, shapes and figures experienced as subsensorial sensations during collective healing sessions. Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen presents a sculptural installation built from a modified wheelchair, as well as a video, countering the medical model of disability through humor. Ren Loren Britton's three-channel video installation gathers stories of coalition building between Disabled, Trans*, Roma, Sinti & other marginalized communities—including the campaign for reparations—reimagining the night sky's constellations through a lens of collective survival rather than patriarchal myth. They also also offer portable, accessible seating interventions, available to rent from Temporary Gallery, inviting trans*, crip, and queer bodies to rest in a natural environment. Justyna Growska's interactive virtual-reality environment invites visitors to converse with an AI water nymph in an underwater world addressing water scarcity, pollution, and biodiversity loss. Finnegan Shannon contributes several quietly radical interventions, among them a clock marking only the day of the week, its hand completing one rotation every seven days. Cecilia Vicua's film documents a participatory performance on a colonial-era bridge in Santiago de Chile, where passersby joined in weaving unspun red wool into a collective knot, recovering memory of a river valley degraded by contamination. Anka Haller's series of small-format acrylic paintings traces a young woman's transformation into a mermaid, once submerged discovering a new freedom—echoing the exhibition's interest in water as a site of liberation.
The accompanying research presentation, detox access spaces, extends the project into 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, it argues for exhibition environments that embrace imperfection, materiality, and the senses, spaces that actively resist intimidation, exclusion, or alienation, and instead foster comfort, accessibility, and shared agency. The project brings together an international group of contributors who are radically altering the embodied conditions for art and culture through bodily sensitivities within their thinking, work, and lived experiences.
A performance day at the Rhine in Cologne, curated in collaboration with Raphael Daibert and Nada Rosa Schroer is planned for November 15, 2026.
Curated by Jussi Koitela and Aneta Rostkowska
In collaboration with Lisa Klosterktter.
Artists: Ren Loren Britton, Justyna Growska, Anka Haller, Pia Lindman, Finnegan Shannon, Cecilia Vicua, Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen
