The exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, “Deixis & Needs” doesn't offer itself up all at once. Helium balloons float in the room, each carrying a long strand of beads that extends towards the floor. Wrapped in embroidered textiles depicting fragments of eyes, mouths and hands, they hover somewhere between sculpture and living bodies. Once every hour, they become resonating bodies for a ten-minute sound piece, inviting visitors to experience sound through vibration as much as through listening. The strands of sheer and colorful beads embody one of the exhibition's central propositions: interdependence. Nothing stands alone. Words, needs, and bodies only take shape through their relationships with oneself and one another, remaining open to change as those relationships shift.
Developed through conversations with collaborators, friends, and community members, “Deixis & Needs” seems less interested in presenting finished objects than in asking how relationships are built: between bodies, between languages, and between people. It is an exhibition that resists easy conclusions, inviting visitors instead to linger with ideas of care, transformation, and collective responsibility.
The title immediately raises a question:
“’ Deixis & Needs’ brings together two words that don't obviously belong together. How did you arrive at them?”
Ren’s answer begins with institutions, rather than with language.
“I started with access needs,” they explain. “The ways institutions ask us to describe what we need to access a space.”
Too often, they argue, access needs become fixed in advance. Institutions identify them, provide the corresponding accommodation, and accessibility becomes something that can supposedly be completed. But bodies are never static. Needs change with time, place, relationships, and circumstance.
This is where deixis comes in. In linguistics, deictic words (pronouns, but also words such as here, there, before, or next) only acquire meaning through context. They depend on who is speaking, where they are, and when.
“Bringing deixis together with needs,” Ren says, “allowed me to think about what it would mean to build a political container where transformation is the norm.”
Instead of asking how institutions might accommodate changing needs, the exhibition asks what kinds of structures would be necessary if transformation itself became the starting point. What would it mean to assume that bodies change? That needs shift? If responsiveness, rather than stability, became the organizing principle?
That same questioning of established structures also shapes Ren's understanding of authorship. Contemporary art still tends to centre the individual artist and the finished object. Deixis & Needs quietly resists both.
“I never come to ideas that are simply mine,” Ren tells me. “My ideas are produced within my community.”
They describe their practice as something grounded in a disability justice-informed trans feminist collective: thinking together, reading together, living alongside one another, and remaining accountable to those relationships.
That position extends beyond the exhibition itself. The accompanying publication is not released under CC2R, a non-conventional copyright license which stands for Collective Conditions to Reuse. The framework shifts attention away from the ownership of ideas and towards the conditions that allow them to emerge in the first place. Ren connects this to traditions of “copyleft” and to Crip Authorship, which ask under what conditions people are allowed to become authors at all and who remains excluded from that possibility.
These questions push beyond theory to shape the exhibition itself.
Inspired by Max Liboiron’s Book Doula Meetings, Ren organized a series of Exhibition Doula Meetings while the exhibition was still taking shape. Friends and collaborators assumed different roles, thinking about aesthetics, curatorial questions, programming, and access as participants actively helping to shape it.
Importantly, they were paid from the exhibition budget.
“I wanted to redistribute not only ideas but resources,” Ren explains. “Why should I be pushed forward as the only author when the work itself emerges through a collective?”
Those contributions later became part of the accompanying zine, extending the exhibition beyond the gallery walls. The publication feels less like a catalogue than a record of shared thinking in progress.
Questions of collective authorship inevitably lead us to another recurring idea in Ren's practice: world-building.
When I ask what kind of world “Deixis & Needs” hopes to create, they hesitate over the terminology.
“I see my practice as a form of world-building,” they say. “I’m also interested in world-making and world-unmaking. I’m still figuring out which term feels most accurate.”
What matters more than the name, they continue, is thinking through a decolonial “practice of presence”: worlds existing alongside one another, invested in one another, and upholding one another instead of insisting on a single dominant way of being.
“The world I hope “Deixis & Needs” contributes to is grounded in disabled and trans histories, brilliance, presence, and futures. I’m not trying to imagine an entirely different world. I’m trying to make visible a world that already exists—a world that is every bit as rich, complex, and beautiful as the one we’re taught to think of as the norm. It’s not that I want other worlds to disappear. I want this one to have space too.”
Towards the end of our exchange, I ask what museums still get wrong when they talk about accessibility. Ren begins by questioning the premise itself.
“I’m actually not trying to make things more accessible,” they say. “Accessibility often becomes another checkbox.”
The more urgent question, they argue, is not simply how institutions make existing structures accessible but what those structures are making accessible in the first place.
“What are we making accessible? And to whom? If access is simply access for access’ sake, I’m not interested.”
Instead, they describe disability justice as a practice of re-worlding: fundamentally rethinking the values on which institutions are built and with which we relate.
“What institutions are still getting wrong is that access is treated like a Band-Aid. Disability justice requires us to unmake and remake the world.”
Almost every answer has reframed my original question. Language leads to institutions. Authorship becomes redistribution. Accessibility becomes a question of values. Like the exhibition itself, the conversation continually resists fixed categories and easy conclusions.
“Deixis & Needs” ultimately asks visitors to consider a deceptively simple question: what happens when we stop treating care, access, and interdependence as additions to an artistic practice and instead understand them as the conditions from which it begins?
On view at Künstlerhaus Bethanien until this Sunday, August 9, 2026
