Parliament at Benaki Museum 2025
Parliament, a work by choreographer and artist Michael Kliën, is a landmark in the emerging field of Social Choreography. Conceptualized in 2011, Parliament was first exhibited at the Benaki Museum in 2014. Since then, it has evolved in design and scope through new iterations across Europe and the United States. The expanded iteration of Parliament was presented for the first time as a full-scale exhibition at the Benaki Museum in the summer of 2025, for which Rafal Kosakowski developed an identity based on the 2021 book A Permanent Parliament. This book has also been expanded to include a new introduction by exhibition curators Polina Kosmadaki and Alexander Strecker and published as a Special Benaki Museum Edition.
Over a period of seven weeks, Parliament transformed the museum and its affiliated institutions into a living organism—a matrix of relations that transcends dominant structures of power and hierarchy. Every day, individuals came together to weave a choreography of connections, and over time, these gatherings grew into a dense tapestry of collective thought and action.
Parliament is more than an exhibition. It unfolds as a participatory site where the dynamics of human relations are reimagined. In a world mired by divisive identities and habitual social norms, Parliament offers a much-needed withdrawal—a space for embodied cooperation and collective presence. It dares us to envision an alternative ethics, a soul-governance enacted through the body.
Parliament is an experiment in democracy beyond language. It challenges participants to confront the unfamiliar and engage deeply with others, allowing genuine connections to emerge. This is not a performance to observe but a living organism to inhabit, an experience that demands one’s presence—a call to action for all who dare to dream of a world made anew.
Since its debut at the Benaki Museum in 2014, Parliament has unfolded worldwide, revealing choreography not as performance but as cultural technology—a Social Choreography that reshapes how we perceive, relate, and imagine new forms of being together. Parliament thus proposes embodied aesthetics as a necessity in the (r)evolution of ethics.
