Within dominant cultural frameworks, shame is often treated as something to outgrow—the opposite of dignity, pride, or confidence.
But shame is not only an inner feeling. It is produced between people:
a social mechanism made of looks, expectations, and silent rules.
It draws a line around what may appear, what must be softened, what is allowed to be desired. Unverschämt! names the moment someone crosses that line. 
 

In German, the word is a reprimand—how dare you—aimed at those who are too bold, too loud, too sexual, too visible, too honest; those who refuse to stay “appropriate.” It carries provocation in its teeth: not polite rebellion, but the kind that interrupts the script and won’t be managed. At the same time, unverschämt can also mean excessively, almost offensively good—unverschämtes Glück, unbelievable luck—hinting at a pleasure that refuses to shrink.

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The exhibition works with this double charge: shame as a tool of control, and audacity as a way of taking it back. It asks what provocation does in queer life—not only as spectacle, but as strategy: a way to survive, to test the limits of belonging, to reclaim the body from politeness, to turn what was meant to humiliate into a chosen stance.

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Unverschämt! also moves through confession and disclosure: what we tell, what we hide, what we perform, what we protect—toward ourselves, our friends, our families, our communities. Confession can be a desire for closeness, a price for acceptance, a demand placed upon us, or a refusal we insist on. The exhibition lingers at these thresholds: between secrecy and statement, between vulnerability and control, between care and risk.

It is an insistence on presence without apology.

* The exhibition instinct#20 Radical Empathy serves as an artistic reflection on the we are village projects. Bringing these earlier initiatives into dialogue, instinct#21 Unverschämt | we are here revisits their ideas,processes, and contexts, transforming them into a new curatorial framework that invites renewed interpretation.