2025.12.06—2026.03.29
Artists: Cao Fei, Chicks On Speed, Tony Cokes, Zuzanna Czebatul, DeForrest Brown, Jr. & AbuQadim Haqq, Aleksandra Domanović, Rangoato Hlasane, Ryōji Ikeda, Maryam Jafri, Robert Lippok, Na Lin Hu, Mamba Negra, Henrike Naumann & Bastian Hagedorn, Carsten Nicolai, The Otolith Group, Vinca Petersen, Daniel Pflumm, Sarah Schönfeld, Jeremy Shaw, Zheng Ke, Tobias Zielony
Curators: Mathilde Weh, Justin Hoffmann, Creamcake, Yang Li, Chu Zhou
From December 6, 2025 to March 29, 2026, MACA Art Center will copresent the group exhibition TECHNO WORLDS with the Goethe-Institut China (Beijing). Initiated by the Goethe-Institut in 2021, the exhibition has toured internationally to cities including Budapest, Montreal, New York, Portland, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Montevideo, Zurich, Dresden, Columbus, and Kolkata. As the first stop of the TECHNO WORLDS tour in China, the Beijing edition will feature 22 works of video, installation, sound, and performance by 22 artists and collectives. Through multiple perspectives, the exhibition maps diverse techno scenes and cultural landscapes around the world, highlighting the vitality and expansive potential of this subculture in contemporary society.
As a global phenomenon, techno has not only shaped music history, but has also set impulses that have impacted contemporary culture, art, pop culture, media consumption and technologies. Techno is music, but also far more than music, finding its echoes in design and fashion, philosophy, subculture, in people’s relationship to machines, to the virtual, in political-emancipatory projects and in the ruins and fissures in hegemonic norms. Techno as a sense of life and time that transcends borders reflects the respective social, living space and economic structures it finds itself in, and can equally well be used as a political tool.
Starting in Detroit, techno has been developing and spreading rapidly worldwide since the 1980s. What was still a comparatively “manageable” world changed radically with digitality and the political upheaval of 1989/90. In Germany, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, techno was seen as a unifying element between East and West. Berlin in particular, which attracted attention in the 1990s with the Love Parade and techno clubs that became legendary, rose to become one of the most important techno metropolises.
Techno and club culture have engendered different eras, styles and variants and are constantly reinventing themselves. TECHNO WORLDS references diverse techno scenes, genres and subcultural political projects at different times and in different places around the world and features a selection of these phenomena as narrated and represented in works by visual artists and musicians.
TECHNO WORLDS is initiated by the Goethe-Institut, curated by Mathilde Weh, Justin Hoffmann and Creamcake, with co-curated by MACA Associate Curator Yang Li and Assistant Curator Chu Zhou. Special thanks to our Community Partner Groundless Factory, Music Partner Apple Music, Media Partner Mixmag, and Philanthropic Partner One Way Street Foundation for their support of this exhibition. We also extend our gratitude to the Paloma Arts Foundation Contemporary Arts Keystone Project and Sofi Zhang for their special support of the exhibition's public programs, as well as to the German Embassy for sponsoring the opening event.
Mathilde Weh
Mathilde Weh is a curator, musician, and artist, and serves as a consultant in the visual arts department of the Goethe-Institut headquarters in Munich. She advises Goethe-Institut art projects abroad and is curator of the touring exhibition Geniale Dilettanten – Subkultur der 1980er-Jahre in Deutschland, for which she published the exhibition catalogue under the same title together with Leonhard Emmerling (Hatje Cantz). A former radio editor, she engages intensively with the topics of subcultures, art, and music and takes part in events and discussions organised by institutions and universities, including the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Germany. Exhibitions in museums and galleries internationally (selection in Germany starting in 2015: Haus der Kunst Munich, Museum Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Albertinum / Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden). Mathilde Weh initiated the project TECHNO WORLDS.
Creamcake (CC)
Creamcake (CC) is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary platform, negotiating the point of convergence in electronic music, contemporary art and digital technologies. Distanced from normative social structures, CC moves in fluid processes of thought and action and engages with current social issues of the present through diverse projects. Curated by Tomke Braun, Daniela Seitz and Anja Weigl, CC organizes exhibitions, performances, concerts, symposia, DJ sets, digital projects, and workshops, including 3hd Festival (since 2015), Paradise Found (2019), インフラ INFRA (2017), Europool (2017–2019) and “Interrupted = Cyfem and Queer” (2018–2019). As a queer-feminist nomadic space, CC has cooperated with a variety of clubs, community spaces and institutions such as Berghain, Klosterruine, OHM, Südblock, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Bob’s Pogo Bar, and WWWβ.
Justin Hoffmann
Justin Hoffmann is a curator, musician (member of FSK) and art historian. Besides running the art institution Kunstverein Wolfsburg since 2004, he has lectured at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Zurich University of the Arts, Braunschweig University of Art and Merz Akademie Stuttgart, among others, and was a visiting professor at the Art University Linz. Selected publications: Destruktionskunst (1995); Gustav Metzger: Manifeste Schriften Konzepte (1997); Das Phantom sucht seinen Mörder: Ein Reader zur Kulturalisierung der Ökonomie (1999, co-editor with Marion von Osten); Strips & Characters: Kunst unter dem Einfluss von Comics (2004, Hrsg.); Non-Stop: Ein Reader zur Ambivalenz von Krieg und Frieden (2005, editor); Der Traum von der Zeichenmaschine (2006, editor); Next Level: Die Lust am Spiel in der Netzwerkgesellschaft (2007, editor); Work Fiction (2007, editor); In the Shadows (2008, editor); Tribute to Gustav Metzger (CD+Booklet, 2008); Best of 50 Years (2010, editor); Learning from Detroit (2014, co-editor with Günter Riederer); Gruppe Schloßstraße 8 (2018, editor); Snap Your Identity (2020, editor).
Yang Li
Yang Li is MACA Associate Curator and Researcher.
Chu Zhou
Chu Zhou is MACA Assistant Curator and Researcher.
