The Kunstverein is pleased to present the works of German photographer Signe Mähler and American poet William Cody Maher. Their joint exhibition, Pandora's Box - An alternate dramaturgy of the past and the present or for a dystopian world brings together images and sceneries, poems and life narratives, introducing a world in which the personal and the universal intersect and mirror one another. 
Through photography, video, poetry, and live performance, the artists explore how the story of a couple can echo both global events and private memories—using the past as a lens through which to understand the present. Their work weaves intimate conversations and anecdotes into surreal, dramatic, ironic, and at times absurd depictions of life’s struggles and wonders.
Together, they invent personas, costumes, and scenes that, in Mähler’s photographs, blur the line between dream and reality—offering an alternative narrative of their shared life and a poetic reading of the world. Maher’s poems, presented as Timelines, trace conflicting truths and unexpected turns within their personal story while resonating with broader collective experience. The show was supported by the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung

Signe Mähler, born in 1947, is a photographer based in Berlin. William Cody Maher, born in San Francisco in 1950, is a writer and performance artist also living in Berlin. In addition to their individual practices, they have collaborated on two documentary films made in the United States: Along Troubled Roads, examining the political climate prior to Obama’s election, and Down Southern Roads, which looks at the American South following Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. They also produced a short film on the writer and translator Carl Weissner, titled Mit ‘nem dicken Hals schreib ich am besten!.

Simultaneously, the exhibition Sediments of Memory: Unearthing Histories Beneath the Mexican Embassy in Berlin featuring works by Carmen Mariscal, as well as the new display Die Welt wieder verzaubern by Barbara Holub in our Schaufenster, will be opening

Coming up: Performative Lesung / Performative Reading: 31. Juli 2025, 19 h