The Floating Republic
In collaboration with guest co-curator and collaborator, Farbod Fakharzadeh, Mental Health Arts Space will launch a two-year curatorial project titled “The Floating Republic” in 2026-2027. The focus is on questioning our ways of working in the visual arts in terms of collectivity, economic sustainability and redistribution. In particular, we will focus on the working conditions that shape our practices, especially at a time when budgets for art and culture are being drastically cut for projects initiated by and serving underrepresented and marginalised groups in the arts and cultures.
“The Floating Republic”, as conceptually defined by Fakharzadeh, uses the idea of the pirate ship as a method to investigate institutional spaces and attempts at self-organisation. The three phases of the project aim to open up a space of exploration and speculative study, blurring the lines between artist and curator, and letting the social interactions, processual relationships and conversations become to a large extent the art “object”.
This in turn creates a framework that welcomes collective processes, texts, manifestos, documented conversations and gatherings at MHAS. Drawing on the history of piracy, institutional critique, non-Western knowledge and the practice of refusal (that expands on the thematic concerns of the group exhibition “As We See Us: A Decolonial Salon des Refusés” at MHAS in 2025), we will explore issues of community building, resource sharing, autonomy and interdependence as pirate values. Mental Health Arts Space, the first docking station of “The Floating Republic”, will be reimagined as a space for alternative forms of labour, dreaming and resistance, while reimagining the power dynamics that define the environments in which we live and work.
The Floating Republic will have its soft launch in February 2026. Watch this space!
The Co-Curators
Farbod Fakharzadeh (he/him) is an artworker and curator based in Finland. He is interested in art’s potential in shaping what is yet to come and his work deals with notions of work, curatorial hospitality, regenerative agency, collective dreaming and political imaginaries.
Farbod currently works as the director at Arte ry and Titanik gallery in Turku Finland. Previously he has worked as co-artistic director for Catalysti ry, a lecturer and curriculum advisor at Node Center for curatorial studies and a co-curator for Rehearsing Hospitalities by Frame Contemporary Art Finland among others roles.
Kathy-Ann Tan is a Berlin-based independent curator, writer and researcher from Singapore. She is interested in alternative and sustainable forms of art dissemination, cultural production and institution-building committed to issues of social justice beyond a merely representational model of identity politics. Kathy-Ann’s practice revolves around creating spaces for conversation, sharing and empowerment for BIPoC and minoritized communities in the arts and cultural scenes in Berlin and beyond. As a former full-time academic, she has extensive experience in teaching, research, publishing, facilitating workshops and public speaking. She is available for talks, workshops and one-on-one consulting sessions.
The Collaborators
Founded by Ernesto Bautista in 2010, The Fire Theory collective includes Melissa Guevara, Mauricio Esquivel, Mauricio Kabistán and Crack Rodríguez. The Fire Theory works collaboratively across disciplines to produce art, curate, develop theory, and manage spaces, fostering discussion on contemporary art and its social contexts.
The Fire Theory has curated and collaborated for exhibitions in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Switzerland, the United States and Norway. They have participated in the X Biennial of Central America (2016), LAIC Latin American Arts for Inclusive Cities project (2016) and RE:CONSTRUCCIÓN (2017), a transnational project that explores the impact of the Salvadoran Civil War among many others.
The Fire Theory are Fellows of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2026.
Ren Loren Britton is a trans*disciplinary artist-designer who holds values that reverberate with trans*feminism, anti-coloniality, technosciences, radical pedagogy and disability justice. Their work with Iz Paehr as MELT has previously worked with anti-ableist technologies as a world building practice centering the agency of disability in technological research and development by and for our communities.
Engaging with loving accountability towards collaboration, accessibility, trans*gender politics and critical technical praxis. Their conceptually driven practice attends to techno-historical storytelling shifting non-linear possibilities; open space for ways of felt, sounded, storied and aesthetic modes of feeling-knowing-making. Britton actions Qüpp with simo_tier & Schwarzrund, MELT with Iz Paehr and Fans Bender with Rosen Eveleigh amidst other collaborations & collectives with beloved crossers.
Founded by Amal Alhaag in 2009, Metro54 is a platform and space for global sonic, cultural, and artistic practices, gathering(s), (un)learning, histories, grassroots community work, spatial politics, and transformative justice in the Netherlands. Together with artists, thinkers, activists, neighbors, writers and hustlers Metro54 organizes pluriversal programs, exhibition projects, collaborations, listening sessions, weekenders, research projects, conversations and take-overs.
Metro54 is a critical celebration, a funeral, a cypher of beings and through experiments, performances, conversations, workshops and dancing, a space for coming together, emergent and everyday strategies of being (together). Metro54 holds space for folks to hangout, see, talk, listen, ponder, perform, laugh, gossip, giggle, learn and make together.
Metro54 will be represented by Qiao Chu Guo.
More collaborators coming soon!
