With Testing Facility, Rosa Stern Space e.V. opens a former Siemens research laboratory, a place that served for decades as a site of technical experimentation, for artistic exploration. The traces of earlier research still mark the rooms: cable systems, shielded chambers, soundproofing, test setups. This historical context is not merely a backdrop but a resonant space for an exhibition that places testing at the center, as an aesthetic, social, and existential practice.

To test means: to allow uncertainty, to take risks, to work with open-ended processes. In the sciences, hypotheses are iteratively adjusted, errors deliberately provoked in order to generate knowledge. In software development, alpha and beta versions emerge, unfinished states that seek public exposure to reveal points of friction. Testing is a condition of productive provisionality, a persistent fine-tuning of a reality that itself exists in constant transition.

The exhibited works also deliberately dwell in this in-between space. They do not present themselves as finished pieces but as tactile thought models, dummies that, much like anthropomorphic test devices, make stress visible without speaking themselves. Within the context of the exhibition, these dummies become ciphers for the question of what our present can withstand, where it fractures, and how it might be reimagined. The works absorb pressure, respond to their environments, reflect fragility and resistance. They offer insight into where we as a society reach our limits, and where new thresholds emerge.

For the climate, both in material and political reality, has grown harsher. Fractures, conflicts, tensions, and uncertainties shape our time more intensely than before. We face the task of adapting to tougher conditions while defending those democratic, social, and cultural principles that are continually being called into question. Social rules, values, and boundaries must be renegotiated, often under increased pressure. In this situation, testing acquires a double meaning: it becomes both tool and diagnosis. We test what holds, and we discover what no longer does.

For Rosa Stern Space e.V., this exhibition format is therefore not only a programmatic decision but also a return to its own roots: understanding the space as an open, fluid, dynamic entity that changes quickly, takes up new vectors, and discards them again. The association began as a structure in motion, without a fixed mode, more like an experimental setup with shifting intensities. Testing Facility reconnects with precisely this energy and carries it into a new phase: an era of testing, accelerating, questioning, and recalibrating.

Within this spatial and conceptual openness, new directions can emerge: spontaneous collaborations, processual transformations, temporary configurations. The exhibition itself remains in flux. It is not a statement but a stress test for artistic practice, for collective work, for the question of how we can remain aesthetically, politically, and socially capable of acting in harsher times.

Testing Facility therefore remains deliberately in motion: not a closed statement, but a stress test for artistic thought and collective action in a time of growing complexity. Curated by Alexander Scharf and Lisa Holzapfel, the exhibition positions itself as an invitation to understand art as an ongoing investigation, as an attempt to probe resilience, to redefine boundaries, and to open spaces for possible futures that refuse to conform to the normative expectations of traditional exhibition-making.