Crit Club returns to Berlin with a new debate: “Should art be competitive?”. Presented by TRAUMA in collaboration with Texte zur Kunst, the performance by artist Cem A. will find its stage on September 10, at St. Elisabeth Kirche (Mitte), as part of Berlin Art Week.
Crit Club is a performance where two teams debate an unrealistic question about art. One side argues for, the other against—until they switch roles midway through, challenged to defend the very position they just tried to dismantle. True to its spirit, every showdown comes with a sport on the sidelines. Past iterations have included boxing, ping-pong, taekwondo, and even pole vaulting. For Berlin, the stakes get higher: arguments will collide with tackles as the Berlin Adler brings American football into the arena of debate.
The Berlin line-up features: Abbas Zahedi, artist based in Ladbroke Grove, West London,Flaka Haliti, artist and educator based between Prishtina and Berlin,Kabir Jhala, journalist based in London between Mumbai, and Lisa Long, Lisa Long, curator and writer, based in Berlin.Moderated by Kate Brown, art critic and curator based in Berlin.
In a field where disagreement feels increasingly risky, Crit Club creates space for critical play. Rather than rehearsing praise or silence, participants are humorously invited to engage in disagreement—as performance, as roleplay, as thought experiment. By reframing critique as a contextual performance, Crit Club pushes artists, curators, and writers into unfamiliar roles, broadening perspectives and inviting new forms of criticality.
TRAUMA was the first to present Crit Club in March 2024 at its original venue in Berlin featuring a muay thai boxing match with the two-times world cup champion Stanislav Perzhanovskyi. Since then, the debate performance has traveled with Cem A. to Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Dubai, London, or Zagreb.
Founded in 2018, TRAUMA has built a reputation for commissioning cross-disciplinary projects that challenge conventional art formats and support collaborative works at the intersection of visual art, music, and performance. Trauma actively challenged the art world's entrenched hierarchies by bringing subcultural, youth-driven, and often marginalized artistic practices into contexts that typically dismiss or exoticize them. After seven years of programming on Heidestraße (Berlin), TRAUMA transitioned into a nomadic curatorial platform. Expanding beyond Germany, it continues to evolve as an international instigator and conceptual infrastructure, adapting to context while fostering experimental, often ephemeral encounters.
The event is organized in collaboration with Texte zur Kunst, on occasion of the magazine’s September issue, which takes sports as its theme. The Sports issue undertakes a comparative analysis of sports and art, with a focus on the distinct inherent logics of the two fields, which rely on specific rules and rituals to establish a distance from normative societal orders.
