Reconfiguring the Public Sphere

Essay, 2026
Art in Culture (Zoom In / Pitching), February 2026
Seoul, South Korea

Berlin is still perceived as a city where freedom of expression and critical discourse are possible. However, if one closely examines the conditions under which speech in solidarity with Palestine is situated, it becomes clear what forms of speech are institutionally bearable and what are structurally excluded. Censorship no longer operates in the form of direct prohibition. It has become routinized through exhibition cancellations, withdrawal of funding, institutional distancing, and the displacement of responsibility onto individuals after speech has taken place.

Held under these conditions, the Gaza Biennale Berlin Pavilion (November 22–December 21, 2025) did not seek to expand or represent speech. Rather, it revealed as an exhibitionary condition the very structure in which speech can no longer be stably constituted.

The public sphere is often understood as a space of rational debate and exchange of opinions. In practice, however, it has always functioned as an apparatus that permits entry only to translatable languages and sanctioned subjects. Within the context of German cultural policy, solidarity with Palestine has repeatedly been classified as “dangerous speech.” Speech may be formally permitted, yet it is left without a sustainable position within institutions. This does not simply mean that the public sphere has failed. Rather, it demonstrates that the premise of translatability upon which the public sphere has relied no longer operates. In other words, the issue is not the radicality or extremity of a given statement, but the collapse of the assumption that such speech can be reduced to institutional language.

Within these conditions, the Berlin Pavilion placed the languages of war, blockade, exile, and survival at the center of the exhibition. Yet this does not amount to a simple expansion of the public sphere. The project does not present the question “Who is allowed to speak?” as a theme or message. Instead, it maintains as an exhibitionary structure a condition in which speech remains incomplete, delayed, and unexplained. The audience is not interpellated as a subject who must understand or judge, but positioned as one who must endure the possibility of untranslatability and misrecognition. Not being understood becomes not a defect, but a condition sustained by the exhibition.

This form is closely tied to the exhibition’s operational structure. The Berlin Pavilion did not take place under the protection of a single museum or institutional authority. It was composed across multiple independent spaces throughout Berlin, and its public programs unfolded through loose networks. This was not an aesthetic choice, but a political technique. By refusing to fix the exhibition in a single site, it avoided concentrating the conditions and risks of speech in one location. Even if a particular space were pressured or closed, the exhibition as a whole would not necessarily be suspended.

However, it would be inaccurate to understand this structure as a “retreat” of institutions. Rather, the Berlin Pavilion made visible characteristics that had always been internal to the public sphere and cultural institutions but had been invisibly managed. Institutions have always operated within state power, ideology, and political-economic interests, and speech deemed unmanageable has been strategically left as a void. The exhibition did not newly produce this void. It captured the moment in which a void that had long existed could no longer remain concealed.

What made the exhibition possible was not public protection, but communal labor. From file transfers and re-production to translation, installation, spatial coordination, and program organization, extensive labor sustained the exhibition. Yet such invisible labor is not unique to the Berlin Pavilion. Invisibility is intrinsic to infrastructure. Infrastructure becomes visible precisely at the moment it no longer functions smoothly. It is at this point that the Berlin Pavilion positions itself as a contemporary artistic practice. Rather than proposing a new solution, it reveals with precision what no longer functions.

The Gaza Biennale Berlin Pavilion does not present a reproducible alternative model. It neither restores the public sphere nor replaces institutions. Instead, it exposes the boundary at which institutions suspend responsibility, and where certain forms of speech and solidarity provisionally emerge. This exposure does not function as a solution but remains as a question: is such a configuration a repeatable political practice, or merely a provisional formation that reveals the operating logic of institutions?

Nevertheless, what this text attempts is to record the structure through which art emerged under conditions in which speech had become unstable. To analyze both the possibilities and the limits of that structure is also a professional responsibility that criticism and research today cannot evade.

Originally published in Korean in Art in Culture (2025). English translation by the author.