At Gallery Weekend Berlin, SOCIÉTÉ Explores Resistance, Memory, And Reinvention

Hinton Magazine
2 hours ago
2 min read

Berlin’s Gallery Weekend has always thrived on tension. Not simply between emerging and established artists, but between politics and aesthetics, history and reinvention, personal language and public discourse. It is one of the few moments in the European art calendar where exhibitions are rarely isolated from the wider cultural weight of the city around them.

At SOCIÉTÉ this year, that tension feels especially deliberate.

Opening on April 30, the gallery presents two distinct solo exhibitions that approach transformation from radically different directions, yet both remain deeply concerned with what endures, what shifts, and what refuses disappearance.

Wynnie Mynerva’s Volveré y seré millones immediately frames itself through historical and political gravity. Taking its title from the final words attributed to Andean revolutionary Túpac Katari, the exhibition positions itself within a legacy of anti colonial resistance, but crucially, it does not treat that history as distant.

Instead, Mynerva appears to approach memory as something communal, living, and structurally present. The phrase itself, “I will return and I will be millions,” rejects singularity in favour of multiplicity. It suggests that resistance is never fully extinguished, only redistributed.

That framework matters, particularly in Berlin, where historical consciousness often shapes the context in which contemporary work is read. Mynerva’s exhibition enters that environment not to simply reference struggle, but to interrogate how collective histories continue to shape identity, power, and relationality now.

Alongside it, Edi Rama’s Chrysalizing operates through a very different visual and conceptual route.

Rama’s new body of bronze sculpture begins with drawing, private, immediate, often instinctive, before moving through digital translation and hand modelling into cast bronze. In that process, the line becomes object. Gesture becomes permanence. Personal notation becomes public structure.

This transition is central to the exhibition’s force. The works are not simply drawings made sculptural. They are studies in transformation itself, asking what happens when something fleeting is given weight, volume, and endurance.

There is an interesting contrast here. Mynerva’s work appears to expand outward, rooted in communal memory and inherited resistance. Rama’s practice moves inward before solidifying, transforming internal gesture into civic presence.

Together, they create a dialogue around survival, one political, one material.

That broader sense of conversation extends beyond SOCIÉTÉ through the inclusion of Conny Maier and Salim Green in Bunker Berlin #5 at the Boros Collection, reinforcing Gallery Weekend’s role not as a sequence of separate openings, but as a wider citywide ecosystem of thought and form.

What SOCIÉTÉ appears to understand particularly well is that complexity does not need softening in order to resonate.

This is not programming designed for passive viewing. It is work rooted in transformation, whether through political inheritance, material evolution, or the persistence of forms that refuse erasure.

In a city like Berlin, that feels less like curatorial strategy and more like necessity.