ein dreiwöchiges Festival von a three-week festival by Mai Ling mit with Leonardiansyah Allenda, Ivanka Custodio and Judy Fugoso, Linda Jiayun Gao-Lenders, Tang Han, Marcos Kueh, Jessica J. Lee, Yen Noh, So Young Park, Ziliä Qansurá, SAE Greenhouse, Shireen Seno, He Shen and Chanyoung Park, und and Tofu Stand

12.–31.05.2026

For Mai Ling’s third and final program in the series Becoming Stickiness: Protocols for Survival, the festival Spring Stretch dives into spring and its transformative and regenerative energy through an exhibition and a series of workshops, performances, talks, reading sessions, interventions, and gatherings. Extending Mai Ling’s rhizomatic relations of friendships, kinships, and alliances, it honours plural relations and practices of collective resilience and survival.

The programme brings together works and practices that reflect on the complexities of language, memory, labor, and belongings that have been shaped by diasporic, migratory lived experiences and various means of knowledge transfer. Some works engage with traditional and indigenous techniques as well as mythology as a medium for storytelling, sharing, and dreaming. Others invite us to listen gently to the surrounding landscapes that nurture multispecies entanglement, collectively imagining agroecological futures. Further, the festival explores dispersed histories of displacement, marginalized ghostly matters, as well as in-between states of life and death, while attending to fragility, resilience, and transformation. It also touches upon representations of gendered and colonial violence, while calling for a collective effort to resist and stick together.
 
Spring Stretch is accompanied by Mai Ling’s ever-transforming mobile kitchen, which acts as a platform for gatherings, imagining communal cooking, collective public eating, and cultural memories around them.
 
Over the course of three weeks of May at 8B®1 in the 15th district, we will be learning from and with artists, researchers, practitioners, makers, writers, and community members whose practices embody and enact sprouting, rooting, and futuring, across generations and geographies.

Tuesday, 12 May
19:00 Opening
19:15 Performance “IN BETWEEN SEANCES” by Yen Noh

In Between Seances is a multi-phased project that engages the Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work as an apparatus for collective study. Its homonymous, evolving installation initially served as a study site that enacted a sonic, visual, and textual archaeology of Cha’s experimental novel DICTEE (1982) in the context of her larger oeuvre. As part of the installation, a study score transposed from the novel enabled various collective and collaborative experiments on site. Combining autobiography with historical, ethnographical, auto-ethnographical elements, DICTEE persistently unsettles established narratives of Asian diaspora, while evoking seemingly distant voices of anti-colonial and feminist struggles. In Between Seances (re)activates this space and builds collectivities at a surging moment of hyper-visible identity politics and the weaponization of language.

Wednesday, 13 May
16:00 - 19:00 Collective Carpet Making Workshop by Ziliä Qansurá

The hands-on workshop with artist Ziliä Qansurá explores the meditative and communal process of felting. Using hot water, soap, and collaborative effort, participants will transform fibers into dense forms that reflect bodily structures and landscapes of memory. Rooted in Bashqort indigenous craft traditions, the workshop invites reflection on identity, migration, and exile while celebrating resilience, transformation, and belonging. No prior experience is required—just bring curiosity and a willingness to create collectively from fragments, gestures, and stories. The session includes a talk by the artist.

Saturday, 16 May
13:00 - 14:30 “together, we read….” with SAE Greenhouse

Centering decolonial feminist perspectives on agroecology, this reading session invites you into a shared practice of listening, grounding, and reflecting. we open a space for slow and radical thinking on existence, resistance, and the worlds we cultivate together. here, we explore post‑growth imaginaries of food as a common, carried through stories of land, seeds, water, and ancestral knowledge. we learn for/from collective forms of resistance and liberation, and we open ourselves to the imaginative possibilities that nourish agroecological futures.

15:00 - 19:00 Workshop "Itinerary of Collaboration” by He Shen and Chanyoung Park

This workshop begins from an evolving itinerary of collaboration that evokes relations, connections, and inspirations, shared among Chanyoung, Shen, and many others—sometimes prompted by cooking tofu, at other times by accents and spoken words. We ask how our entangled trajectories might become a creative resource that nurtures plural futurities.

Sunday, 17 May
14:00 - 16:00 In conversation with Jessica J. Lee

Writer and environmental historian Jessica J. Lee shares her creative journey and research into the entangled ecologies between plants and human migration. She traces the story of plants considered “out of place”—weeds, colonial specimens, and transplanted crops—meditating on border crossing and (un)belonging to reimagine the entwined futures.

Friday, 22 May
19:00 - 20:00 Collective Sound Walk “notes of a sleepless cicada” by Linda Jiayun Gao-Lenders

What waits underground before it sings? notes of a sleepless cicada is a site-specific, collective soundwalk that moves between the lines of memory and collective daydreaming. Inspired by the cicada as a symbol of resurrection in Chinese mythology, the walk invites participants to listen closely to their surroundings and to what lies beneath the surface. The walk starts at the Kunstverein and moves along the park to an area where we can rest collectively.

*Please bring a phone to scan the QR code, as well as headphones/earphones with you.

Sunday, 24 May
14:00 - 15:00 Talk by Marcos Kueh

Marcos Kueh’s practice centres on textiles as a medium for storytelling, drawing from Borneo’s ancestral weaving traditions to explore themes of identity, labour, and globalisation. He uses weaving to encode contemporary myths from everyday life, just as the ancestors of Borneo did with their dreams and legends before the arrival of written alphabets and writing tools from the West. The artist will join online.

15:30 - 16:30 Screening, Mai Ling Picks
Tan Hang, “Miss Ginkgo: Chapter 1” (2021), 4:37min
Tan Hang, “Miss Ginkgo: Chapter 2” (2022), 6:13min
Tan Hang, “Gingko and Other Times” (2023), 15min
Shireen Seno, “To Pick a Flower” (2021), 17min

Friday, 29 May
19:00 Performance "nachhallendes Fleisch, vertraute Zeiten" by So Young Park

"nachhallendes Fleisch, vertraute Zeiten" unfolds as a process of observing, touching and sensing one’s own aging body, where care becomes a central method of preparing for one’s funeral. The performance traces how its body and skin wear over time, and how the body begins to resemble itself. It approaches death through acts of maintenance, attention, and endurance, allowing care to become a mode of encountering Warm-Death. Within this process of preparation, Between eyelids and pupils emerges as a continuation of these accumulated gestures, taking the form of a floral wreath for one's own funeral.

Saturday, 30 May
14:00 - 18:00 Hair Cuts by Leonardiansyah Allenda

Hair cuts by Amsterdam-based artist and professional hairstylist Leonardiansyah Allenda will be happening at the gallery on Saturday May 30 and Sunday May 31. All sessions are approximately 1 hour - 1.5 hours in duration and are tip-what-you-can; all funds go directly to the artist. Please remember to wash your hair before your session :)

Spots are limited! Please book your session here.

15:00 - 18:00 “To Make Pa Litaw (To Surface)" by Tibok (Ivanka Custodio and Judy Fugoso)
 
A food delicacy workshop performance that collectively creates space for reflecting ways we may reclaim the pleasures of making, consuming, and sharing food—so that these become a practice that affirms life, community, and resistance. In this piece, we invite everyone to warm up, open their palms, taste buds, and move their fingers and limbs.

Sunday, 31 May
14:00 - 17:00 Mai Ling Mobile Kitchen Workshop with Tofu Stand

Tofu Stand, a Berlin-based Chinese collective, shares the wider scope of their collective practice — spanning activism, self-publishing, somatic work, and explorations of how we move and transform together.

As the festival arrives at its final gathering, Mai Ling also invites participants to activate the Mai Ling mobile kitchen. Bring your own ingredients and recipes, along with the stories and memories they carry, as we gather to cook, share, and create collective rituals of eating together!

14:00 - 17:00 Hair Cuts by Leonardiansyah Allenda