We are excited to present SICK IN THE CITY, running August 22 -24 mostly at Casino (and one event at Spore on Sunday)!
SICK IN THE CITY is a weekend event series to showcase three years of collaborative research and artistic exchange between us, your humble queer feminist art and curatorial collective, COVEN BERLIN, and University of Atypical, an art institution by and for d/Deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent artists and cultural workers in Belfast. Our work together centers on how we can approach the art world with access in mind in a way that identifies physical barriers to participation, as well as the barriers that racism, classism, ableism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia present, among others.
What if the art world was… accessible? A welcoming place? A pleasant queer time?
Through different collaborative projects and collective-member overlap with Sickness Affinity Group, COVEN BERLIN started working in 2021 with Vital Capacities, a platform that provides an accessible space for artists and audiences who may be limited by resources or physical barriers from participating. They connected us to University of Atypical and in 2022, we began working together by hosting paid online residencies for queer disabled artists and researching how best to support artists with different needs. In 2024, we hosted our first in-person artist residency exchange between Belfast and Berlin. This year we were generously supported by the Cultural Bridge 2025 program to continue our collaboration and widen it to support a second art residency exchange and community research in both our cities.
Community research gave us the means to meet with and connect to different initiatives that conceive of queer disability justice in expansive ways. This ranged from framing the German support of genocide and apartheid in Palestine as a disability justice issue, to everyday experiences of ableism in the city, to holistic, non-institutional, community-driven spaces for people who have had experience with psychoses and psychiatric treatment in Berlin.
SICK IN THE CITY is intended as a contained space and time to celebrate this past work and offer it a temporary nest. Our resident artists will both perform, Belfast-based artist Husk Bennett and Berlin-based artist Chris Yohei Tokunaga, and we will host events intended for community building, resting, learning, zoning out, listening, chatting, playing, making stuff with our hands, eating, exchanging.
Events program:
Friday, August 22
Location: Casino for Social Medicine (Access Information below)
18:00 – 20:00
Tufting Drop-in + Han
Because we need each other, we’re starting this party off right with a slow-paced crafting session that requires no previous skill-set or knowledge. The queer Irish collective Bog Cottage will be showing folks of all levels how to tuft, a type of textile manufacturing done with a hand-held tufting-gun on canvas, this technique is most commonly used to make rugs. You are welcome to drop-in, hang out, listen to music, craft on your own, or tuft with us. We will be demonstrating how to tuft in spoken English and German.
Bog Cottage began as an informal gathering of friends searching for a sense of community in the west of Ireland. What started as casual meet-ups, where members experimented with clay and DIY projects, eventually grew into a dedicated and focused art practice. Their work aims to build a community-driven model of art making that fosters artistic collaboration, skill-sharing, and mutual support. Bog Cottage’s most recent exhibition 2024 A Year in Review: Moving, Growing, Fighting exhibited the duo’s attempts at art making in 2024, and in September 2025 the group begins a residency in Brown Mountain Diamond where they will build a pond. 🙂
21:00
un: the reverse state of
jockeying: (to) handle or manipulate (someone or something) in a skilful manner.
‘: informal – used to capture tone.
Combining elements of socially engaged practice with audio-visual technologies, Husk uses visual imagery from a series of workshops initially delivered alongside University of Atypical in early June 2025 with the D/Deaf, disabled, neurodiverse and queer community alongside sounds collected from festivals, TV, and social media to create an experimental and performative outcome.
Incorporating audio-reactive visuals and live broadcasting methods, the work shifts between levels of contemporary culture, disability justice, written word, hedonism, revolt, political-response, nonsense, life-experience, and dialogue.
This work seeks to understand the links between contemporary urbanity and disability; exploring a tense vulnerability between the analogue and the accidental; allowing for tenderness, connection and mutuality.
Ghost on the Asphalt: a semi-improvised electronic live set by Chris Yohei Tokunaga
This performance is a semi-improvised electronic live set. It will be performed with Ableton live using the push and several other midi controllers. The idea is to flexibly design an arrangement for each piece using pre-made clips, blending in parts that were recorded and looped on the fly, and using effects to make the performance more dynamic.
Chris Yohei Tokunaga is an electronic musician and producer. He experiments with form, mixing the arrangement of electronic dance music with more traditional melodies. He does the sound design, composition, and post production for his project. He’s currently working on two projects. The first is his Audio Portrait series which is his way of capturing the people and moments that interest him. He will be showcasing some portraits at the listening session at The Listening Session at Spore Initiative on Sunday. The second is his spiritually oriented music project which features songs about his thoughts and feelings on the topic of spirituality. It will feature songs about his experiences with hallucinations, madness, and faith.
Husk Bennett (he/him±) is a Belfast-based visual artist. His practice explores complexities of contemporary human experience engaging at an intersection of media saturation, and evolving definitions of labour within the contemporary late-stage capitalist landscape.
Saturday, August 22
Location: Casino for Social Medicine (Access Information below)
12:00 – 13:00
Harm Reduction Trivia Quiz, held in spoken English
What do you know about viruses, pandemics, and the science (or myths) behind them? Without judgement or condescension, Leo Rain will lead a trivia quiz (with prizes!!!) on topics ranging from the HIV pandemic, queerness and virology, and best practices we can implement today.
Leo Rain is multi-disciplinary artist, educator, immigrant, and community organizer based in Berlin. Leo has a degree in spatial design, teaches life drawing, and disability-centered workshops and organizing as part of different movements for the last 12 years. They are currently doing a generative somatic training.
14:00 – 16:00
Anisha Gupta Müller is an art educator and workshop host specialising in developing anti-discrimination pedagogies. Her interdisciplinary courses bridge the gap between art theory and local activism, questioning the relationship between power, privilege, and our own creativity. Her practical work focuses on feminist body practices and Safe(r) Spaces, including FemmeFitness, a politicised dance fitness class she founded.
Currently based at weißensee kunsthochschule Berlin, she has lectured at institutions such as the Ruskin School of Art Oxford, Kunsthalle Wien, University of Arts Belgrade and Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin.
Armeghan Taheri is a writer, artist, curator, memer, self-proclaimed clown and founder of Afghan Punk magazine, a community magazine that creatively connects liberation struggles with one another. This year she will be running Afghan Punk City, a community project that explores creative methods of appropriation and claiming space in the city. Whether she is writing, making memes or organising herself creatively, she is looking for misfits, the strange, the uncomfortable reflection. Her art practice is a playground for distortion, disruption, and disorder in relation to language, power, image and discourse.
17:00
In this talk, queer historian Finn Ballard delves into the history of Aktion T4, a campaign of mass murder that targeted people with a variety of disabilities in Berlin starting in 1939. The talk will be presented via zoom in spoken English with captions and a spoken German simultaneous interpretation will be provided.
Finn Ballard is a historian and educator based in Berlin and originally from County Down, Northern Ireland. Since completing his Ph.D. on the influence of Germanic folklore on film in 2009, he has been leading historical tours of Berlin. He also teaches German history at two institutions in the city, writes for the Berlin-based magazine Siegessäule, and occasionally works as a historical advisor for cinematic and televisual productions.
18:30 Dinner
To end the night gently in the company of other queerdos and sickos, we will transform Casino into a banquet with a vegetarian dinner provided by the Lebanese restaurant Azzam, located just a couple of blocks down Sonnenallee.
Sunday, August 24
Location: Casino for Social Medicine
14:00 – 18:00
Dungeons & Dragons Pop-Up Campaign with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
7 Players only / Registration Required
Dungeons & Dragons is a structured, yet open-ended role playing game where participants create their own characters and make moves with a set of dice. COVEN BERLIN members were recently introduced to the game through the artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and our lives have forever changed. Playing D&D gave us the chance to play with gender and identity, exit linear narratives, be centaurs, communicate outside allistic norms, and make new worlds together of queer gloom and hope.
This game will be a pop-up campaign, meaning it will only last four hours and is designed especially for folks who have no previous experience playing D&D before! The game time will have breaks throughout and everyone is invited to have dinner together at the end of the game. The game will be played in spoken English.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist living and working in Berlin. Danielle creates work that seeks to archive Black Trans experience. She uses technology to imagine our lives in environments that center our bodies, those living, those that have passed, and those that have been forgotten. Her work is really about you: how you feel is the medium and you may feel uncomfortable, you may feel represented, you may feel uncomfortable, but you won’t feel forgotten.
17:00 – 19:00
Location: Spore Initiative (Access Information below!)
Listening Session with Chris Yohei Tokunaga
Join us as we lay down, listen, and space out to the sounds of Chris Yohei Tokunaga in a soft place. We will be gathering to listen to his most recent work and artistic research.
Spore Initiative is a wheelchair accessible space and has seating with backs as well as soft places to lay down. No language proficiency is required to take part, but we will be introducing different songs and pieces in spoken English and German.
Chris Yohei Tokunaga is a Berlin-based electronic music producer and composer. He has lived with different forms of hallucinations for over two decades. With a deep interest in spirituality, he hopes to turn the terrifying beginning of his hallucinatory biography around and embrace a positive existence. In the same breath, he will be documenting his journey musically.
Access Information on our main venue Casino:
Address: Sonnenallee 100, 12045 Beriin
Closest bus station: Erkstrasse (M41, M43), approximately 1 minute walk
Closest Ubahn station: Rathaus Neukolln (U7), approximately 7 minute walk
- The space is on the street level, accessed through the door without any steps. The door is more than 90cm and opens inside.
- There are various seating options, including sofas, wooden chairs, and cushy benches.
- The space is permanently non-smoking, with a functioning air change system.
- We use low scent cleaning supplies
- The bathroom is not gender-assigned.
- The bathrooms are in the basement, not wheelchair accessible, only via a flight of stairs (10 steps). There is no toilet equipped for wheelchair users, however, we have a partnership for the weekend at the Köşgeroğlu Baklava restaurant on Erkstraße 14, 12043 Berlin. Tell us before you go and we’ll give you 1 Euro to use their bathroom. It is an approximately 2 minute walk from Casino.
- Please take a COVID-19 test before entering, they are available for free. Facemasks are available for free and encouraged to wear if you can.
- Dogs are allowed and we kindly ask their humans to check in with people around them about their comfort and possible allergies.
- No personal identification required to enter
- We do not call the police
Access Information for Spore Initiative
(for the Lie Down Listening Session on 24.08 at 17:00):
Address: Hermannstraße 86, 12051 Berlin
Closest Train station: U-Bahnhof Leinestraße (U8), approximately 1 minute walk away and S-Bahnhof Hermannstraße (Ringbahn), which has an elevator and is approximately a 5 minute walk away.
- All program and exhibition spaces, as well as restrooms are accessible for people using mobility aids or those who prefer to avoid stairs
- Entering the Spore building via the barrier-free main entrance is suitable for people with limited mobility, wheelchairs, and strollers. The elevator is located on the ground floor.
- Please take a COVID-19 test before entering, they are available for free. Facemasks are available for free and encouraged to wear if you can.
- Our aim is to make our space and activities as accessible as possible in terms of physical and social barriers.
- The space for the Listening Session will have chairs with backs, soft couches, and soft pillows to use on the floor.
- Spore is committed to creating a space free of discrimination, violence and hurtful behavior and language.
- Animals are welcome, but please put them on a leash.
