When the free-floating modernist roof of the Congress Hall collapsed in 1980, a Western symbol of freedom crumbled with it. The exhibition The Pregnant Oyster traces cracks and constructions of minor narratives of world after Western Universalism. Taking inspiration from the ambivalent nickname that Berliners gave the building due to its form, it asks how horizons of a shared world are born out of concrete, incorporated, situated narratives. The oyster as a queering animal that changes its gender at will, occasionally producing precious surprises, fragile and valuable, is a metaphor for this meandering search. This exhibition is the result of a research and residency project, which brings together five positions across the visual arts, writing and the sonic.

The "Minor Universality" project, which conceived the residency and exhibition, issued an open invitation to ponder how it is possible to think of world, humanity, and justice in spite of the internal paradoxes of Western Universalism – and how to do so beyond relativism and identity fragmentation? The propositions in the exhibition derive from situated forms of doubt and engagements of the dominant through the minor. They share an urgency to work with the birth of a world within the ruins of the former West.

The Pregnant Oyster exhibition and residency program is funded as part of the project “Minor Universality. Narrative World Productions After Western Universalism” at Saarland University, which received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant agreement No. 819931).