Quarantine are today announcing The Questions, a project featuring a live exhibition, performance, conversation and cultural exchange happening in both Manchester, UK and Chemnitz, Germany as part of Chemnitz 2025: European Capital of Culture. The Questions asks: who – and what – belongs here?
Twin cities since 1983, Chemnitz has a similar industrial heritage to Manchester. However, the median average age in Chemnitz is 52, a generation older than Manchester’s average of 31, and the oldest in Europe. The Questions is about creating circumstances for encounter between people who might not usually meet, across generations and more broadly across both cities and nations.
Unfolding on different scales – from intimate conversations in a library, to a live exhibition presented in both a museum and an art gallery – the project continues Quarantine’s exploration of diverse approaches to mass portraiture.
Building a series of structures for sharing and assembling, the project is presented in Manchester across a number of venues, including the premiere of new durational performance and live exhibition Telescope at Manchester Museum; Would Like To Meet, an artists’ exchange at HOME Manchester and an in-conversation event, The Art of Assembly, at Contact.
Throughout November, Quarantine transform the ground floor of contemporary art gallery Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz – Museum Gunzenhauser in Chemnitz and take up residency in three libraries across the city over two weeks. Through live exhibition, conversation and an ever-changing installation, you’re invited to gather, reflect and respond to ideas about belonging across generations. All welcome, whatever you think…
Join us in Manchester and Chemnitz this autumn
Manchester
Telescope
Preview: Wed 15 Oct, 5–7pm
Thu 16 – Sun 19 Oct, 12–4.30pm
Manchester Museum
Tickets: Pay What You Can, book tickets here
As part of The Questions, Quarantine will premiere brand new work Telescope at Manchester Museum, open Thursday 16 – Sunday 19 October, 12–4.30pm. Telescope is a live exhibition of borrowed belongings, and their owners’ thoughts about where they themselves belong.
Young people on the cusp of adulthood and older people who’ve lived a life will be invited to lend something to display at Manchester Museum – maybe something they’d be devastated to lose, something they’d like to get rid of, something they found and kept… Over four days, this evolving exhibition is animated by a live dialogue, as Quarantine ask the lenders a series of questions as starting points for conversations that are by turns complex, funny, familiar, extraordinary – and profoundly human.
It’s an insight into what we hold on to; what we value and why, both individually and as a society.
Would Like to Meet
Mon 6 – Sun 12 Oct
HOME, The Arches
Would Like To Meet brings together 5 artists from Chemnitz with 5 artists from Manchester, each with a generational age gap, asking what questions they might have for each other.
Working in textiles, ceramics, ikebana, visual art, performance, photography and illustration, the group of artists will come together for two residencies, the first in Manchester from 6–12 October. The residency time is for sharing practice, making space for the questions they have for one another across generations and cities.
Artists talk
Thu 9 Oct, 6–7pm
Contact
Book tickets here
Quarantine host a talk on responding to everyday life and their latest project, The Questions.
The Art of Assembly: Hosted by Florian Malzacher
Sat 11 Oct, 2–4pm
Contact
Tickets: £5/£3 concessions
Book tickets here
Cities are palimpsestic—constantly rewritten through traditions, conflicts, identities, and ideologies that shape their realities. In recent years, they have increasingly found themselves in competition, with municipal councils tasked with constructing urban identities that function as brands, carefully curated to appear distinctive and attractive on both national and international stages. Arts and culture have become central instruments in these strategies, with major investments in flagship projects designed to promote a city’s ‘official’ identity—often by highlighting past successes or staging large-scale spectacles. Yet what space remains for independent ideas or contemporary cultural practices that resist or fall outside such hegemonic narratives? The 32nd edition of The Art of Assembly explores the kinds of assemblies that arts and culture generate within the urban context – and what they write over.
Playwright Linda Brogan explores the archaeology of a Manchester soul and funk club, the Reno, the theatre and audience for 50s born mixed heritage people in the 1970s. Curator Alistair Hudson advocates for cultural policies that focus on social engagement and collective participation, using art to empower local communities. Artist and Lecturer Jenna Ashton explores how heritage, feminist and community-based cultural practices shape urban narratives.
Chemnitz
The Questions
Tue 4 – Sat 29 Nov
Open Tue – Sun, 11am–6pm
Museum Gunzenhauser
Visit their website
Who – and what – belongs here? In this museum – and in this city? Quarantine transform the ground floor of Museum Gunzenhauser with The Questions. Through live exhibition, conversation and an ever-changing installation, you’re invited to gather, reflect and respond to ideas about belonging across generations. All welcome, whatever you think….
The Questions at Museum Gunzenhauser is part of the museum’s exhibition programme Best of II: Visitors’ Choice, running from 20 September 2025 – 18 January 2026.
Telescope
Sat 15 & Sun 16 Nov, 12–5pm
Wed 19 – Sun 23 Nov, 12–5pm
Tue 25 – Sat 29 Nov, 12–5pm
Museum Gunzenhauser
Entry included in ticket to Museum Gunzenhauser
Telescope is a live exhibition of borrowed belongings, and their owners’ thoughts about where they belong.
Young people on the cusp of adulthood and older people who’ve lived a life will be invited to lend something to display at Museum Gunzenhauser – maybe something they’d be devastated to lose, something they’d like to get rid of, something they found and kept… Over three weeks, this evolving exhibition is animated by a live dialogue, as Quarantine ask the lenders a series of questions as starting points for conversations that are by turns complex, funny, familiar, extraordinary – and profoundly human.
It’s an insight into what we hold on to; what we value and why, both individually and as a society.
Moving Boxes – a participatory installation
Sat 15 Nov 2025 – Sun 18 Jan 2026
Open Tue – Sun, 11am–6pm
Museum Gunzenhauser
Entry included in ticket to Museum Gunzenhauser
Do you still have the boxes you last moved house with? What does it say on them? ‘Chemnitz’? ‘Bedroom’? ‘Miscellaneous pots and pans’? Are they empty now? Or still waiting to be unpacked?
We’d like you to lend us your empty moving boxes. The installation of boxes will form an invitation to visit to arrange and re-arrange them in ever-changing constellations – shaping walls, pyramids, cities – whatever you choose…
Building of spines
Thu 6 – Thu 13 Nov
York Library & Vita Centre
Yorck-Center open Tue (10am–6pm), Thu (10am–4pm) and Fri (10am–6pm)
Vita-Center open Mon (10am–6pm), Wed (2–6pm), and Sat (10am–2pm)
Free, drop-in
Sat 15 – Sat 22 Nov
Chemnitz City Library
All days (except Wednesday) 10am–7pm
Wednesday 2–7pm
Free, drop-in
In Building of spines, Quarantine artist Kate Daley hand makes a book containing a work of collective fiction based on conversations with people in different Chemnitz libraries.
The texts are shaped by local writer Gabi Reinhardt.
The finished books will then enter the library’s collection for future readers. Beautiful objects, carefully made, the books are an alternative portrait of each library, the people who use them and the knowledge they hold.
Would Like to Meet
Mon 24 – Sun 30 Nov
Museum Gunzenhauser
The second part of this artist exchange takes place in Chemnitz, as Quarantine bring together 5 pairs of artists from Manchester and Chemnitz with an intergenerational age gap.
The invitation is for the pairs to spend time together in a determinedly open-ended way, engaging in conversation, experimentation and shared experiences.
Working in textiles, ceramics, ikebana, visual art, performance, photography and illustration, the artists have been invited to use Museum Gunzenhauser as a hub.
The Art of Assembly: Hosted by Florian Malzacher
Sat 29 Nov
Time to be announced
Museum Gunzenhauser
For the first time, this Art of Assembly repeats its topic – a tale of two cities, told in each place, one month after the other. This in-conversation brings together artists, activists and thinkers in a longitudinal research study into how and why it matters that we physically assemble, and what this enables – socially and politically – in a time when so much is uncertain. In Chemnitz, the focus will be the subject of intergenerational assembly and the layers of experience a city holds.
Join Quarantine at Museum Gunzenhauser for the second of these two in-conversation events.
Speakers to be announced.
About
The Questions is part of the Allianz Foundation’s ‘Fixing what’s broken. Together.’ grants programme. Supporting international projects across a range of disciplines, the funding is designed to create and protect networks of relationships against division, in the face of political, technological and social pressure.
The Questions is presented in collaboration with ASA-FF e.V. and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz – Museum Gunzenhauser
Part of Chemnitz European Capital of Culture 2025
In cooperation with Allianz Foundation
Supported by Cultural Bridge, Manchester City Council and The Skelton Charity
This project is part of the European Capital of Culture Chemnitz 2025. This project is co-financed by tax funds on the basis of the parliamentary budget of the state of Saxony and by federal funds from the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media).