Celebrating Diversity & Highlighting Engagement
Queer Guided Tour with Drag Queen Cali Harburg
25 May 2026, 3 pm

Vessels and voyagers. Bodies that carry. Bodies that travel. Bodies that remember what others would rather forget. The JUNGE AKADEMIE’s exhibition “Vessel & Voyager” (13 Mar – 10 May 2026) explored loss, healing, protection and community through 25 international artistic positions. These are questions that have always permeated queer realities of life.

What lies between the works, what bodies inscribe and what art spaces prefer to keep silent – for this, sometimes a poem, a sound, a moment of silence is needed. This tour goes where it touches and where it carries. Where memory becomes collective and community remains possible, even where it was not intended. Poetry, music and philosophy are not mere accompaniments here, but rather what art uses to reinforce itself – and what unleashes something within us that the objective gaze does not usually seek.

Cali Harburg – the name is no coincidence, but a statement: inspired by Aby Warburg, the great visual thinker, boundary-breaker and notorious collector of obsessions. Like him, Cali believes that pictures do not hang silently. They have an effect, they speak, they provoke. And sometimes you have to answer them out loud. As a “sofa queen” from Hamburg, Cali exists not only under the spotlight, but above all in conversation: among friends, in the first sincere sentence of the evening. She listens, tells stories, challenges and fills the room with warmth and sharpness in equal measure. With a migrant background, art history and philosophy in her pocket, Cali has built her own language: post-migrant, queer, receptive to whatever resonates.

As a storyteller, she brings her audience into contact with art, bodies and what lies between the images – with what is often overlooked in curatorial concepts yet still awaits a response. Her emotionality is not decoration, but method. Cali does not wear her knowledge as armour, but as a means of seduction: it creeps in before you realise you have just seen something you can no longer shake off.

Democracy lives through people who get involved. Many queer communities, initiatives and support structures have been sustained for decades by voluntary commitment – often unseen, yet of great social importance. On this day, we would like to honour this work and make it visible.

For this reason, on Whit Monday, 25 May 2026, the Akademie der Künste invites all people engaged in voluntary work – and everybody who is interested – to visit the exhibition Vessel & Voyager free of charge.