Exhibition
Out of Focus. Un/Commoning Curatorial Practices through Multimodal Engagements
Curatorial Team: Anja Dreschke, Simone Pfeifer, Anna Lisa Ramella, Beatrix Hoffmann-Ihde together with Nanette Snoep and Kristina Hopp; Curatorial assistant: Romy Berthold
Time: Tuesday Sept 30th, 10 am – 6 pm, Wednesday, October 1st, 10 am – midnight, Thursday Oct 2nd 2025, 10 am – 8 pm
Place: Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum – Cultures of the World | Cäcilienstr. 29-33 | 50667 Köln
Exhibition reception and performance: Wednesday, Oct 1st 2025, 6 – 8 pm
Programme: on the website of AG Medien: https://agmedien.de/events/out-of-focus/
Link to call for interventions
Contributions and abstracts: P071 https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/dgska2025/p/16288
Out of Focus brings together anthropological and artistic projects that challenge dominant modes of seeing, listening, sensing, knowing, and narrating. Across film, photography, sound, installation, performance, app design, and multiple modalities, the exhibition explores how blurriness, fragmentation, and participation can become tools for resistance, care, and shared meaning-making. From feminist co-curation to decolonial archives and critical app design, each contribution questions what is centered, what is left out of frame, and how we might create commons through uncertainty.
The exhibition centers on the idea of un/commoning: a movement where certain narratives, images, and media practices help build communities of resistance and care, while others reinforce exclusion, hierarchies, and control. By working with blurred visuals, sounds, broken archives, participatory formats, performance and open-source tools, contributors resist the demand for clarity and control. Instead, they invite the audience into spaces of uncertainty, tension, and co-creation. Thus, the exhibition “Out of Focus” is an invitation to dwell in uncertainty, to look differently, and to imagine otherwise.
Through the curatorial project, we ask: Can we use the “out of focus” to shift attention away from extractive practices and towards collective ways of knowing? Can we turn curatorial spaces into commons, sites of shared care, critique, and possibility?
As part of the GASCA-Conference 2025 in Cologne, the Working Group Media(anthropology) curated the exhibition ›Out of Focus‹ for selected intervention spaces in and with the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum. From Tuesday, September 30th to Thursday, Oct 2nd, 22 selected works are on display at various locations in the museum. On Wednesday, Oct 1st, 2025, there will be an exhibition reception and a performance along with the conference party.
Long Abstract:
The curatorial project offers space for reflection on multimodal strategies as well as artistic and anthropological interventions as means of anthropological knowledge production. It is particularly interested in the inquiry of how multimodal engagements foster commoning processes, thereby creating (new) forms of solidarity or resistive practices and critiques of power structures. It also seeks to understand how they might contribute to uncommoning processes, reinforcing exclusionary and extractivist systems. Here, the project particularly stresses the asymmetrical power relations that play out in these different institutions and systems of work.
The emphasis lies on how media practices are involved in and integrated into these processes also within research. At the same time, it recognizes that multimodal and curatorial formats foster or assist diverse forms of knowledge transfer. Such practices often involve forms of distorting, reflecting or reassembling of fieldwork or archival materials. How can they relate to decentralized and resistant practices of self-determinant critiques of capitalism and power structures, with the aim of contributing to processes of commoning?
Of particular interest are how multimodal projects question the relation between exhibition space and/as media space, and how we can create new commons through media and curatorial practices. What does it mean to exhibit ethnographic knowledge against the backdrop of ongoing debates on the decolonization of museums and collections? How can scholars develop counter-strategies that blur the lines in different directions? This involves the discussion of multimodal openings of exhibition spaces; or the relation between media, public space and off-spaces.
The exhibition includes diverse formats as performances, films, photographies, videos and mixed media installations. Some of these works were developed site specific and engage with the museum and its surrounding space and its collection items/objects. Selected works will be on display even after October 2nd 2025.