BERLIN — It’s become clichéd to say that music unites us, but Silvina Der-Meguerditchian turns this truism into a nuanced and polyphonic exhibition with Those who take care of us. At Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, the Armenian-Argentinian artist affirms music’s binding power while also revealing the ways in which music-making, as any artistic activity, is tainted with cultural prejudice.
Curated by Barbara Höffer and Lusin Reinsch, the show comprises videos, archival documents, photographs, and multimedia installations. A qanun, a traditional stringed instrument from Armenia and other parts of Southwest Asia and North Africa, is also displayed in a glass vitrine. It’s a fitting pride of place; the first cluster of works, titled and grouped under the theme of Resonance, bears out the instrument’s importance. For the short film “Qanun Archives: Cairo Munich” (2024) — initially told from the perspective of a Black Nile catfish whose skin is used to make strings — she interviews the musician Hanan El Shamouty, who immigrated from Cairo to Germany only to discover the latter’s bias toward Western music theory, disregarding her traditions.
In her films, Der-Meguerditchian juxtaposes such rigid hierarchies of musical taste with transportive stories in which fish, trees, and disembodied ghosts are reincarnated as qanuns. In “Qanun Archives: Buenos Aires” (2025), set in the 1950s, a young man from the city’s Armenian community is guided by a spirit to an exiled qanun master, and persuades an Argentine friend to build the instrument. Another short, “Armenia” (2025), captures the agility of women playing qanun, while the voiceover recaps the career of the first Armenian female Qanun player, Angela Atabekian, in a tradition historically dominated by men. In the end, in all these tales, music transgresses geographic, social, and cultural boundaries, acting as a key agent in building and preserving collective memory.
As the exhibition progresses, the qanun also emerges as a stand-in for diasporic migration — not just through sound or vibration, but rather a state of awareness, a connective tissue binding Memory (the show’s second theme) and preservation, or Care (its third). In the middle galleries, Der-Meguerditchian then weaves personal and archival photographs and documents, such as passports, into laminated carpets hung from the ceiling. These commemorative mosaics create a mnemonic cascade — locations, such as Aleppo, Istanbul, and Berlin, commingle; family portraits and postcards are shown alongside snapshots of ceramics, jewelry, and other small objects. These portable mementos speak to cumulative loss, culminating in the exhibition’s final section in which it’s no longer objects or archives as portable carriers of memory but the body itself.
The artist strikingly evokes women’s bodies in a series of braids made from wool, each titled with female names and displayed as sculptural objects on the walls. In the short film “Care to Care” (2024), young women, seated outdoors in a rural setting, brush each other’s hair in fluid strokes. There’s perhaps no better way to describe these gestures’ rhythmic, languid pacing than “musical” — and it is here that Der-Meguerditchian finally brings out the central aspect of her oeuvre. She treats not only music but also the human body, in all its expressivity, as a language, affirmed and renewed through daily gestures of preservation and care.
Those who take care of us continues at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin, Germany) through April 6. The exhibition was curated by Barbara Höffer and Lusin Reinsch.
