'Cafe Death' with Alona Karavai

Death Cafe is an open format and a social franchise of self-organized and non-commercial meetings of people, often strangers, who gather to eat cake, drink tea, and speak about death. Those meetings are group-directed discussions based on personal questions to death, rather than theoretical disputes or professional grief support. The Death Cafe model was developed by Jon Underwood and Sue Barsky Reid, based on the ideas of Bernard Crettaz. Alona Karavai has been facilitating the format of Cafe Death in different cities of Ukraine since summer 2025 as part of the Insha Osvita program called School of Death. The idea behind it is to manifest diverse formats of grief and to speak about death as an act of both commemoration and vitality.

Alona Karavai is a cultural manager and curator from Ukraine, co-founder of the project space Asortymentna Kimnata in Ivano-Frankivskand the media about art post impreza. She worked in the contemporary art center Izolyatsia while it was based in Donetsk, till she had to flee. Following the forced relocation, she co-founded a few artistic initiatives, among which the School of Contemporary Art fra fra fra dealing with emergency art residencies as well as programs for refugee artists and artists after/during combat experience in Ukraine. She is based in Kyiv and works with the topics of peripheries, absence, as well as vitality and death.

Booking: Registration online
Limited capacity

Next date:

• Date Sunday, 21/June/2026 19:00 bis 21:00
• Venue KW - Institute for Contemporary Art
• Address Auguststraße 69, 10117 Berlin-Mitte