We Have Never Been Only Human

The title of this exhibition (29 October 2026 to 20 June 2027) poses a challenge: "We Have Never Been Only Human". At first glance, the Berlin Museum of Medical History seems to be a place where exactly the opposite is true: specimens, instruments and collection items that, over the centuries, have served to examine, understand and focus on human beings – a museum of the anthropocentric perspective.

On closer inspection, however, these same objects tell a different story: one of relationships that never portray human beings as isolated entities, but rather as the focal point of a multitude of connections. Thus, whilst the exhibits in the collection’s dissection room focus on a single organ, on closer inspection they reveal much more: for example, human–animal relationships, as in the case of a specimen that shows the human body as the habitat of a tapeworm, another organism. Rudolf Virchow, for his part, recorded precisely in his specimens, his autopsy reports and his notes on his desk – a central object in the permanent exhibition – what in the human environment causes disease and how these reciprocal relationships manifest themselves right down to the cellular level. His cellular pathology, which occupies a central place in the museum, focuses on the cell as the smallest unit – yet at the same time argues that humans can never be conceived of independently of their environment and of a range of relational connections. Humans are thus embedded in a multitude of relational – that is, social, biotic, visionary, but also ideological and hierarchical – relationships. The museum’s collection is therefore, from the outset, more ambivalent than it appears. It is precisely this ambivalence that forms the starting point for the twelve artistic and scientific works presented here.

The members of the responsible Junge Akademie's Research Group understand the posthuman, the "more-than-human" and the "non-human" not as an abstract theoretical field, but as a question that is equally relevant across a wide range of disciplines: from human genetics and the neurosciences, art history and philosophy, robotics and systems biology, to theology, history and the arts. In this context, the posthuman is understood not merely as a diagnosis of the present, but also as a historical and aesthetic figure – Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) already responded to a world transformed by the eruption of Mount Tambora, whilst simultaneously raising the question of whether humankind is "playing God". The Research Group therefore examines the posthuman, the more-than-human and the non-human in their temporal density – through the interplay of historical perspectives, contemporary imperatives and future thought experiments. What unites the members is the conviction that many of the most pressing questions of our time – from the climate crisis and artificial intelligence to the potential interventions of genetic engineering – can no longer be answered if humanity continues to be regarded as the sole yardstick for the world and reality, without taking diversity and living environments into account.

The twelve speculations presented in this exhibition are not definitive answers, but rather experimental set-ups. They take the collections, spaces and history of this museum seriously, in order to ask – in a site-specific manner and in dialogue with them – what remains when humans are no longer placed at the centre – and what might take their place: animals, plants, machines, microbes, data, objects. The fact that artistic and scientific perspectives not only complement one another but also repeatedly merge is no coincidence, but rather a deliberate choice: the question of the posthuman can only be posed in an interdisciplinary manner.