Antonina Stebur Appointed Exhibition Curator for transmediale 2027

transmediale has announced Antonina Stebur as the curator of its 2027 exhibition, which will coincide with the festival’s 40th anniversary. The Belarusian curator and researcher was selected through an open call process, with a proposal that stood out among a large number of applications.

“My curatorial and research practices look at how infrastructures – digital, social, or emotional – shape power, exclusion, and fragile solidarities, but also open spaces for collective imagination,” says Stebur. “For transmediale 2027, I propose an exhibition that reframes the festival’s 40th anniversary through the lens of ruins of infrastructure as a method. Rather than celebrating achievement, it lingers within breakdowns, the militarisation of everyday systems. I would like to rethink transmediale itself as a configuration, not only a site of representation, but as a framework of imagination for the futures we urgently need.”

Stebur’s practice spans curatorial and editorial work exploring contemporary art as a tool for infrastructural and political imagination. She is Editor-in-Chief of AWC Journal and founder of Mycelium [Грыбнiца], a decolonial research lab. Her previous projects include What Are Our Collective Dreams? (2025, Warsaw), If Disrupted, It Becomes Tangible (2023, Vilnius), and Sense of Safety (2024, Kharkiv). She also co-organised the interdisciplinary conference Feeling Machines: Gender, Technologies, and Capitals, and has contributed to documenta 15, Manifesta 14, ZKM, and Theatertreffen Berlin, among others.

Selected by the Board from a strong shortlist of candidates, Stebur’s concept impressed for how it weaves transmediale’s history—and the parallel trajectories emerging since the late 1980s—into the current moment of geopolitics and contemporary conflict. According to the Board, the proposed key ideas of failure and infrastructure, ruins and glitches connect powerfully with Berlin’s own urban history, situating transmediale within broader cultural and political contexts.

“The exhibition concept resonates with transmediale’s core themes—criticality, grassroots resistance, and the interrelation of technology and politics—while also adding a bold, imaginative dimension through the invitation to train our ‘utopian muscles,’” the Board stated.

The transmediale 2027 exhibition will open at the end of January 2027 at the Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg) in Berlin, running for approximately six weeks alongside the festival. Marking the festival’s 40th anniversary, this edition also introduces a more sustainable and regular rhythm, featuring a major exhibition every two years.

Image credits: Image courtesy of Antonina Stebur, photo by Violetta Savchits