COSMIC COUNTERREADINGS Saturday

COSMIC COUNTERREADINGS accompany the exhibition through critically and collectively rereading COSMIC GIRLBOSS. Artistic and scholarly impulses alternate on exploring magic, gender, and spiritual entrepreneurship. Around Walpurgis Night, researchers talk and artists perform to challenge old narratives — re-reading, refuting, and counter-narrating. For three days, interactive performances and talks take place at Galerie im Turm.

SATURDAY SCHEDULE

3pm Welcome Card Reading and Group Discussion, hosted by Frances Breden with guests

4:30 Lecture: Bewitching Art and Academia? Hexing Epistemic Twists by Celica Fitz

5 pm Salesforce Child Cellar Tour with Frances Breden

5:30 Discussion: Occulture as Girlboss? When occultism meets art, society and academia with Emily Hunt and Isis Mrugalla-Kalmbacher

7 pm Performance: From Mercury to Sulfur: a talk about love, alchemy and fascism by Margarita Athanasiou

ACCESSIBILITY

This day will be hosted in English spoken language. There will be a live English transcription to read along. Salesforce Child’s video installation is only accessible via a starcase. More accessibility information is on our About Us page.

INPUT DESCRIPTIONS

Welcome Card Reading and Group Discussion with Frances Breden

To set the stage, we consult the cards: What does this May weekend hold for the speakers and audience, as Mercury enters Taurus and a dynamic alignment between Mars and Jupiter promises clear communication and financial stability? Breden will give short card reading for the event, and will host a conversation with the participating artists and academics, introducing them and giving them a moment to reflect on her prognisis.

Bewitching Art and Academia? Hexing epistemic Twists with Celica Fitz

This lecture critically and playfully rereads references to magical practices in contemporary art. Backwards, wrinked, shrill, twisted: by inverting normative orders, the aesthetics of magical figures have been consistently reproduced and deconstructed in art. Overwhelmed by the power of their non-linear narratives, lost in their time warps and upside-down worlds, turned around by their trickery, Fitz takes us through the dizzying ways to be, to represent, or to counterread the witch*. Magical practices are often conjured as subversive tools in art: suspended between lived practice and cheeky wit, they transcend gender roles, deepen holistic experiences of environments, or even call for counterspells against patriarchy and capitalism, while reclaiming diverse powers for revolt. Whatever or whoever the witch may be, it’s historically fragile and definitory resistant. Eschewing categorisation, this input draws some lines between current invocations of the witch and historical traces. How did this mighty figure come from being defined in the Early Modern criminal code to now being an epistemic tool questioning modernist paradigms in academies and museums?

Salesforce Child Cellar Tour with Frances Breden

A guided tour into the dank underworld of Salesforce Child’s video installation ‘Wellness is not Possible’.

Occulture as Girlboss? When occultism meets art, society and academia with Emily Hunt and Isis Mrugalla-Kalmbacher

Occultism in society has been explored by artists, religous scholars, and magicians alike. They have created occult art, analyzed magical popular culture, and practiced forms of pop-cultural magic themselves. In this discussion, researcher Isis Mrugalla-Kalmbacher provides insights into the history and different meanings of the term and into her ethnographic research on chaos magic and contemporary esotericism. Mrugalla-Kalmbacher engages in discussion with the artist Emily Hunt about how her work can be understood through the concept of occulture, how she perceives the relationship between occultism and social responsibility, and which analytical perspectives on magic and esotericism she’s adopted. In addition, they discuss queer-feminist perspectives on occulture and on Hunt’s work.

From Mercury to Sulfur: a talk about love, alchemy and fascism by Margarita Athanasiou

A lecture-performance from artist Athanasiou on her installed artworks in the Galerie im Turm. Athanasiou gives a fantastical, historical perspective on the relationship between fascism, the occult, and the Internet as seen through the practice of alchemy.

BIOGRAPHIES

Margarita Athanasiou is an artist and organiser based in Athens, Greece. Her practice is text-based, utilises collage techniques and brings together autobiography and history to create multi-layered narratives in the form of publications, video essays, prints, memes and digital images.

Frances Breden is a curator and artist dedicated to community-based and collective art-making in digital and IRL spaces. Since 2014 she has been part of the queer feminist art collective COVEN BERLIN and is a founding member of Sickness Affinity Group. From 2024-2026 Frances is carrying out a curatorial fellowship with the Galerie im Turm.

Celica Fitz is an art historian and scholar of the study of religions, researching aesthetics and history of knowledges intersecting with contemporary art. As a curator she develops tools for research based curating. She is conducting an interdisciplinary dissertation in museology and art history (University of Neuchâtel) and the study of religion (University of Marburg) and works for the Museum of Applied Arts Frankfurt/Main and in Berlin. She is a member of the ENCHANTED EPISTEMES.

Emily Hunt’s artistic practice critically engages with the historical and cultural significance of ornament, magical practice, and grotesque imagery as vehicles for subversion and transgression. Her ongoing research focuses on Renaissance print media, specifically the period’s occult philosophy and the archetype of the witch as portrayed in Renaissance print culture.

Isis Mrugalla-Kalmbacher, M.A., is a scholar of the Study of Religions with a focus on contemporary esotericism, magic, and ritual practices, especially the magic scene and chaos magic. She teaches and researches at the Institute for the Study of Religions at Tübingen University and is board member of REMID e.V.. Her PhD on Chaos Magic focused on immersive practices and worldmaking in ritual and play. As science communicator she is actively involved in several podcast projects, such as #wonderland (Schöner Glauben). She is a member of the ENCHANTED EPISTEMES.

Across painting, video, performance, writing, drawing, and social media, Summer Emerald’s/Salesforce Child‘s work speaks in an idiosyncratic yet immediately recognizable blend of corporate and devotional language. The work reflects the semiotic chaos of contemporary systems, imbued with the sense that what we have built is leaving us behind.

The COSMIC COUNTERREADINGS are co-organised by the ENCHANTED EPISTEMES, represented by Celica Fitz.

Spirituality, esotericism and magic are popular terms often used to subsume non-hegemonic epistemologies. The research collective ENCHANTED EPISTEMES develops the concept of “enchanted epistemes” as a tool for researching such current ways of knowing and worldmaking in group rituals, healing, in digital spaces and material culture, contemporary art, and their intersections with academia.

Examining such contemporary forms and processes of performative (re-)enchantment, the research collective seeks to connect theoretical and methodological approaches from the aesthetics of religion and material religion, sociology of religion and knowledge, history of religions, and gender studies. The research group’s goal is to collectively develop the term ENCHANTED EPISTEMES as a tool for researching contemporary spiritual practices and aesthetics of knowledge.

Information on the Walpurgisnacht event (30 April)

Information on the Sunday event (3 May)

This project is supported by the Berlin Senate Fund for Presenting Contemporary Art in Berlin.