House of Kal

Allah, you gave us a language
where yesterday & tomorrow
are the same word. Kal.
—Fatimah Asghar

On September 13, the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) will open its new space on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz with the House of Kal: a tidal coHabitat of queer anticolonial worldbuilding. 

In many South Asian languages, including Hindi, Urdu and Bangla, the word “kal” means both yesterday and tomorrow. The community architecture and polyphonic co-habitat House of Kal combines an exhibition, a radio station, music, film, performance and workshop programs, zines and publications.

The artistic and activist positions interconnect modes of survival and reimagination that emerge from water bound ecologies around the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the northern Atlantic and the River Spree. Together they propose an anti-map of ecologies of practice invested in collectivity, resistance, worldbuilding and imperfect solidarities, with a focus on queer, migrant and decolonial relationships between the Global North and South across time and space.

Materially, socially and as an ecosystem, the exhibition space of House of Kal at nGbK acts as a khum̐ṭi (transliterated as khNuti), a device commonly used in the Bengal delta to tie down boats and cattle. In everyday Bengali parlance, khNuti is also used to denote a spiritual and existential tether, a metaphoric stick to which one ties their hopes and desires, a means of support to hold each other. Similar to the khNuti that is hammered into the river bank to provide a temporary home for moving entities, such as people’s boats, goats and dreams, House of Kal offers an anchor for oceanic and riverine beings, floating devices, imagined harbors, and other collective spaces—navigating water and sound waves to connect the survival of people and communities in the kal network through the many waterways we have to cross during our lives. From stories of refugee women* protesting and worldbuilding on rafts and ships, queer oracles jinxing neocolonial extractivism and the displacement of coastal communities in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, to the border collapsing powers of community radio waves, and cosmonauts surfing the wave function of cosmic timespace, House of Kal tethers the fleeting architectures of our hopes and dreams to this ephemeral khNuti in Berlin.

See the full opening program here.

The entire opening will be streamed live on Instagram (@ngbk_berlin).

With Anandita Bajpai, Archive Books, Aziza Ahmad, Bino Byansi Byakuleka, Radio Kal, Radio WeAreBornFree!, Rohini Devasher, Rongili Biswas, Sakina Aliakbar, Sarnt Utamachote, Spaceship Beben (Promona Sengupta, Adriana Disman, Jorinde Schulz, Sumona Dhakal, Asmara Tensil), The Many Headed Hydra collective (Aziz Sohail, Bryndís Björnsdottír, Emma Wolf-Haugh, Suza Husse & Alizeh Ayesha, Ayesha Chaudhry, Khalida Hussain, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Ni6369 Shell samples, Paloma Ayala, Pia Arke, Sabeen Omar, Vasi Samudra Devi, Veenadari Lakshika, Zahra Malkani a.o.), Vicky Shahjehan, Venuri Perera, Women in Exile, Zahabia Khozema & kal community offerings by Aio Frei, Arshia Fatima Haq, Chathuri Nissansala, Franck-Lee Alli-Tis, Hema Shironi Joseph, Lucas Odahara, Sehan Khanna, Sophia-Layla Afsar, Tehreem Mela, Yvonne Wilhelm/knowbotiq, Vera Ryser, Zubaan Books a.o.

Building the House of Kal
House of Kal at nGbK is part of the transoceanic platform a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. Kal (kal). Founded in 2020 by a group of artists and activists, kal is a nomadic place for listening, music and movement, for practicing vocabularies at the crossings of art, anticolonial feminisms and eco-politics that articulate radically different ways of being alive together in entangled futures, pasts and presents. The name of the platform is inspired by a line in Fatimah Asghar’s poem Kal and extends the invocation of this word that means both “yesterday” and “tomorrow”, shifting its meaning based on who speaks, from where and when. Expressing a time beyond the here and now, the meaning of kal moves fluidly between bodies, territories, histories and futures along the movement of tongues.

From 2020 to 2022 kal unfolded as queer houses for art and community making in Karachi, Colombo and Berlin, as well as online DIY radio programs, workshops and collective publications, performance, music and video productions. In 2022, fragments of the growing archive of kal were exhibited in Philadelphia. This community was fostered alongside deep ruptures and dissonances through pandemic time, continuing economic, political and social crises in both Pakistan and Sri Lanka, border regimes, ongoing wars, as well as ecological disasters. Through this time, kal has become a collective organism that dreams other worlds into reality and breathes the capacity of living and thriving in difficult circumstances. The collective propositions presented at nGbK have emerged from the community-based practices fostered in the previous iterations of a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word.

From 2020 to 2022 a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. kal has been a collaborative organism made possible by District*School Without Center with Archive Books, the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Communtiy, Goethe-Institut Sri Lanka, Goethe-Institut Pakistan, ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, IVS Gallery Karachi, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Twelve Gates Arts Philadelphia and Zubaan Books.

House of Kal 2023 is collectively cared for by the nGbK work group of Aziza Ahmad, Promona Sengupta and The Many Headed Hydra (Aziz Sohail, Suza Husse, Emma Wolf-Haugh)

yesterdaytomorrow.space

Supported by ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.
Part of Berlin Art Week.
The neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) is funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Community.