The Heist: A Tour Guide converted the BPA//Raum into a tourism office offering a city tour through Museum Island for one’s voyeurist delight. It provided personal anecdotes and stories of the places, from the 19th-century Reich’s militarist capitalist expansion to the museum’s intrinsic contribution to imperial aesthetic expression. In erecting and running such monolithic monuments, what labour stayed hidden underneath, powering the machine of beauty? “The stones that house the impartial sciences wept. Their tears brushed the walls in shining white.”

皮包公司 Pibao Gongsi is a collective formed by Tian Guoxin, Liu Chao and Hannah O’Flynn under the umbrella of with the rubbles of old palaces. It researches how empire represents itself, as well as the relation between aesthetics and imperial power. It looks at how the practice of art, infrastructures of exhibition making and of cultural knowledge production are indebted to the relent- less efforts of empire-making. 皮包公司 Pibao Gongsi is a collective effort to look at how art and exhibition practices can be thought of outside, beyond and before imperial self-representation, even while Empire continues to be our daily experience.