The myth goes: Echo lost her voice to punishment, left only with the last word spoken to her. What remains when agency is taken from language? The question at the centre of Echo Alliances, a new exhibition at ACUD Galerie in Berlin, is not rhetorical. It names a condition still active, still capable of being worked through, still producing something.
Curated by Colette Patterson and Carmen Herold, the show brings together Jordan Deal, Kasra Jalilipour, and Dina El Kaisy Friemuth in an investigation of the echo as both acoustic event and cultural inheritance, a figure drawn through Spivak's reading of Ovid, through Saidiya Hartman's conditional temporality, through NourbeSe Philip's severed and reassembled tongue. The body here is archive: what accumulates in skin and breath across generations, in the told and the retold, in polyphony, ululation, the rhythms that survive what was done to silence them.
The exhibition does not treat knowledge as a stable object waiting to be uncovered. It reads it relationally, in the passage between people, in the spontaneous circle that forms around a performance, in the bystander who becomes a participant. Solidarity, the programme argues, is a sonic phenomenon: it requires proximity, resonance, the willingness to be altered by what moves through. Where there is no echo, there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.
Live programming runs through May and June, including a newly commissioned performance by Deal, a storytelling evening with Dina El Kaisy Friemuth and Maha El Kaisy, and a TABLOID Press reading presented in collaboration with Project Space Festival. Echo Alliances forms part of Tenants of Tender Armour, ACUD Galerie's ten-month programme with Goethe-Institut im Exil.
Opening: April 30, 2026, 18h. On view through June 28.
Participating Artists: Jordan Deal @jordandealart , Kasra Jalilipour @kasrajalilipour , Dina El Kaisy Friemuth @dekf_12053
Curated by Colette Patterson @colette__patterson and Carmen Herold @carmen.hld
Visual identification: @charlotte__rohde
In collaboration with and funded by Goethe-Institut im Exil.
Curated by ACUD Galerie