Anna Ehrenstein’s series „Universes” stages the clichés Europe attaches to “the foreign”: bao buns, Uludağ Gazoz, LV monograms, evil-eye sneakers, colonial-era masks in candy colours. The works do not try to correct these stereotypes. Instead, Ehrenstein stacks the symbols, repeats them and saturates them until they tip into glamour, armour and drag. In Sara Ahmed’s sense, these are sticky objects: things onto which feelings about belonging and otherness have been glued through endless circulation. Made for the context of German postmigrant theatre invited by dramaturg Murat Dikenci, the series ridicules the idea of an “authentic” counter-image of a postmigrant Germany, because that would accept the logic that someone must prove who they really are. Its vindicationist aesthetic lets the sitters occupy the projection and hold it on their own terms.

Printed on brushed aluminium with the rounded corners of a phone screen, the images mourn the consumerist cosmopolitan dream. The cosmopolitan promise of the late twentieth century imagined a citizen of the world who sampled cultures freely; mostly a white, western, male citizen. Seen from post-national Europe, that promise turns out to have been a consumer’s position: the world as food court, with free movement for commodities but not for humans.

What actually holds the city together is the Späti, the Imbiss, the bubble tea counter and the fake bag sold on a blanket. In times of hardening borders and rising ethno-fascism, the series celebrates this vernacular, working-class conviviality, built by the very people the cosmopolitan imagination fed on but never included.