Calendar

Venue:
Museum für Kommunikation
Leipziger Str. 16
10117 Berlin

Concept: Peter Geimer (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris), Arno Gisinger (Université Paris 8), Elissa Mailänder (Sciences Po, Paris)

The event is organized by Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris as part of the lecture series The Ends of War. International Perspectives on the Second World War, initiated by the Max Weber Foundation.

The private images that amateur soldier-photographers created during the Second World War are one of its critical material and documentary legacies. As examples of amateur photography, a cultural practice shared across boundaries of time, space, and ideology, these images demand consideration from interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives. But as sources and texts, they invite as many questions as they answer: what roles did they serve during the war and what roles do they play in today’s global and digital world? What do they disclose about the intertwined histories of racism, misogyny, and colonialism? What ethical responsibilities and implications are involved when we look at graphic images of violence and genocide?

PROGRAM
10 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Panel 1: Artistic Approaches
Coordination: Arno Gisinger
Art and War Photography, Martin Dammann
The last one is me – examples of the simulacrum, Tatiana Lecomte
P.O.V. (Point of View), 2016, Clemens von Wedemeyer

3 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Panel 2: The Lives and Afterlives of Amateur Soldier-Photography in World War II
Roundtable Discussion

Welcome and Introduction: Peter Geimer (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris)
Moderation: Daniel H. Magilow (University of Knoxville, Tennessee)
Participants: 
Ofer Ashkenazi (Hebrew University Jerusalem)
Elisabeth Edwards (De Montfort University, Leicester / Oxford University)
Elissa Mailänder (Sciences Po Paris / Centre Marc Bloch Berlin)
Sophie-Charlotte Opitz (Bucerius Kunst Forum Hamburg)

5 p.m.–7 p.m.
Reception

Venue:
HGB, Raum 4.5


Kunsthalle der HGB is a project that transforms the office in room 4.5 into a temporary exhibition space. In the coming months, solo exhibitions by students will be shown here regularly.

We look forward to seeing you!

opening hours:
Tue-Fri: 11am-5pm, Sat-Sun: 12pm-4pm

Venue:
Ciné / Cinémathèque Leipzig
Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 109
04275 Leipzig

Partner:
Studentenwerk Leipzig Kulturförderung

The exhibition project RESONATING REVOLUTION is dedicated to the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine. Based on the idea that revolutions do not spread linearly but throughresonance, the video installation examines the echo that this revolution has left behind. The revolution is not understood as a completed event, but as a process that reverberates to thepresent day.

The exhibition takes a fragmentary approach to collective memory by means of interviews,sounds, images and essayistic text excerpts. These are woven into a multi-layered web andtogether create a walk-in resonance space. At the same time, RESONATING REVOLUTION addresses forms of collective and solidary practice and raises questions about utopia andcommunity in the European context.

More information...

Venue:
HGB, Raum 3.24

"To say what art does is not to say what art is; but I would ask you to consider whether we are not really interested in the former." _Nelson Goodman

Prof Michael Riedel
HARD DRIVE Lecture [ 1o ]
Wednesday, o2.o7.2o25
1o:oo o'clock, Room 3.24, HGB.

HARD DRIVE instead of EASY GOING when it comes to managing the flood of data. And the question: My drive a work of art? The HARD DRIVE lecture series focuses on the practical examination of the user interface of the digital storage medium as a carrier of collected ART FILES.

opening hours:
Fridays 14-18 h

Venue:
Kunstraum Ortloff
Jahnallee 73
04177 Leipzig
www.ortloff.org


'Von hinten durch die Brust ins Auge' describes making things unnecessarily complicated in everyday life-while in hunting, it refers to an impossible shot, traveling precisely- entering through the back and the heart into and out of the eye. During a CAT scan, however, this shot becomes easy. Images of the body are formed layer by layer enabling the viewer to move through the tissue. The idea of seeing through the layers fascinates me. My desire is to see through them- to understand not only what I am doing, but also what painting means to me-taking a shot at it, much like revealing the hidden structures beneath the surface. The analogy to the impossible shot lies in the fact that I can never connect with the object of desire (which might be a painting or a physical body) as much as a CAT scan is able to. Neither can I move through the canvas nor anybody else.

opening hours:
Thursday, Friday, Saturday 12:00-18:00

Venue:
a&o Kunsthalle
Brandenburger Str. 2
04103 Leipzig

opening hours:
2-8 p.m.

Venue:
Techne Sphere Leipzig
Niemeyerstraße 2-5
04179 Leipzig
www.technesphere.de


4 July 18:30-20:00: Reading and discussion

opening hours:
Fridays 3-6 p.m. and Saturdays 12-3 p.m. and by appointment

Venue:
Galerie Kleindienst (Westside)
Franz-Flemming-Straße 9
04179 Leipzig
www.galeriekleindienst.de/

Venue:
Werner Vogel Schulzentrum
Hans-Marchwitza-Straße 12
04279 Leipzig


The HGB Choir is an offer of the university for its members. Choir practice is every Wednesday 18:30-20:30 in room 3.05. All HGB students, teachers and staff are cordially invited to sing along!

opening hours:
Sun 14-20 h, Mon 12-20 h

Venue:
Techne Sphere Leipzig
Niemeyerstraße 2-5
04179 Leipzig
www.technesphere.de


Linocuts and sculptures (gallery room 1)

opening hours:
(through public guided tours): Wed. 6 - 7 p.m. / Fri. - Sun. 3 - 4 p.m.

Venue:
G2 Schaulager
Dittrichring 13
04109 Leipzig


In Lydia Marx's video work Little Pictures, a camera drone acts as the flatmate of two women who live together in a large house in a rural area. The drone is sister, brother and friend and acts simultaneously as performer, image producer and narrator of the film. It navigates the viewer through the story of Hanna, Lilli and itself. In doing so, she produces images, explains situations, thoughts and contexts. It accompanies the two women through their everyday life inside the house and outside - we see them eating together at the kitchen table, leisure activities in the living room and garden, working in the fields and a funeral. The drone comments on what it sees and experiences. However, it increasingly appears as an unreliable narrator, as there are misleading inconsistencies within its statements and images: Hanna reads a book upside down, Lilli plays the piano with her toes, keyboard typing is described as playing the piano, a radio is mistaken for a dog, which is then destroyed, buried and interred. In the film, the drone's perceptual errors, its deviations in pattern recognition, become actual visual image errors. The drone itself occasionally recognises its own inadequacy and fallibility, for example when it comments at the beginning of the film:

'Although I practised a lot, I had trouble finding the entrance door. I often bumped into the narrow frame. Lilli was very good in entering the entrance door, even though she did it for the first time.

The backyard looked like the rivers, mountains, forests and shopping centres that I already knew and could usually distinguish when they were connected on maps.

She is referring to the way in which it learns in its technical function as a camera drone, which has a data memory and speaks using artificial intelligence, through repetition and reproduction, through the continuous collection of data and its compilation in an archive; how it can better recognise, distinguish and conceptually categorise its surroundings over time. The drone collects so-called training data in order to be able to act better - perhaps even more human-like? - be able to act. The drone's physical actions and movements still appear clumsy and downright vulnerable at times. And despite all the tenderness that resonates, its statements often seem interchangeable and superficial; they are learnt by heart and reproduce clichés. The drone's statement quoted above also addresses another central theme that Little Pictures deals with and that narratively connects the three very different characters - Hanna, Lilli and the drone - despite all their emphasised differences: Memories.

Not only the two women, but also the drone itself has a memory. According to her own statements, she has a memory that she sometimes describes as an almost poetic archive of memories, for example when she consciously recounts her life with birds that taught her how to fly. The drone's memory store is characterised by a local orientation: The situations and emotions it remembers are linked to individual rooms and places that are connected to each other via a so-called map. If there are disruptions between the respective connection points on this map, this can lead to disorientation and memory loss. The drone's memory does not only appear to be a carrier of its own memories, but the two women have also outsourced individual memories to the drone. In the film, Marx juxtaposes Hanna's and Lilli's apparent pregnancies with the drone's memory and storage. In doing so, she uses the image of human pregnancy to refer - associatively - to the specific significance of the human body as a storage location; as a repository not only of past memories, but also of the visibility of the future in the present.

In Little Pictures, Marx uses her specific characteristics of the drone to pose the question of how (human) memories are dealt with in the technological age and what the demands on technical devices are. And she also asks what people - from an ethical perspective - consider worth living for. After all, what significance does the drone have in their lives together and what role does it play for the two women? Although Hanna and Lilli include it in some situations and think about it, it takes on the subordinate role of a pet rather than that of an actual flatmate. Nevertheless, Little Pictures describes an almost intimate relationship between human and drone, which is revealed in particular by the unusual use of the technical device indoors and its narrator's voice and clearly deviates from the rather negative connotation of the drone as a distanced instrument of war, control and surveillance that has been established in the visual arts to date.

Exhibition text by Rahel Schrohe

Venue:
HGB Bibliothek

Curated by Michal B. Ron, based on the idea by Regine Ehleiter

After six semesters with the basic course "Political temporality(ies) in art: History? Present? Future?" the question was posed to the holdings of the HGB library: What temporalities can be found between the pages, on the bookshelves and in the stacks? The students of the basic course of the summer semester 2025 propose temporal terms and search for publications that deal with the respective term, disembody it or even stand in tension with it. Starting from the archive and library, we collectively developed a temporality-based lexicon that spans from "durée" to "emptiness" to "cycle". Our aim is to rebel against the canon of art history, its hierarchies and dominant narratives and to enable other, rhizomatic connections.

What time is it in the library?

For the "Hidden Treasures" exhibition series, publications from the otherwise inaccessible stacks of the HGB library are presented. Often, only a subtly placed colour-coded bookmark or a coloured underlay indicates that it is an exhibition exhibit.

opening hours:
Tue-Fri: 2pm-7pm, Sat-Sun: 12pm-6pm

Venue:
gfzk - Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig
Karl–Tauchnitz–Str. 9-11
04107 Leipzig
gfzk.de

In an installation of salt sculptures, palm branches, metal and videos, Ronny Aviram traces the emotional landscapes of departure. She combines biographical experiences with biblical stories and Mediterranean myths. The story of Lot's wife from the Old Testament serves as her starting point: fleeing from the impending destruction of Sodom, she looks back at her hometown against God's instructions - and turns into a pillar of salt. The look back can be interpreted in different ways. For Aviram, it reflects the complex relationship between what lies before and behind a person who leaves a familiar place. For her, both the departure and the backward gaze are part of a process. This is characterised by inner conflicts and conflicting feelings, by the hope of a new beginning and the longing for what lies behind. In Aviram's work, salt symbolises the persistence between the past and the future as well as the duality of destruction and preservation.

Ronny Aviram lives and works in Leipzig. She studied philosophy at Tel Aviv University and photography at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. Werde ich zu einer Salzsäule is the final project of her diploma studies with Prof. Dr Ines Schaber. She is the winner of the study prize of the Friends of the HGB and Sparkasse Leipzig (2019) and co-author of the book TelAviVienna: Vom Heimkommen (2022, with Christina Maria Landerl).

opening hours:
Fri.: 16:00-22:00, Sat: 14:00-21:00, Sun.: 12:00-18:00

Venue:
Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
Wächterstraße 11
04107 Leipzig

The HGB invites you to the Diploma Tour, which shows the final projects of this year's graduates. Visitors can look forward to exhibitions throughout the Academy building. Works by over 70 graduates in painting/graphics, photography, book art/graphic design and media art can be seen in around 20 exhibition rooms, organised by the graduates together with Ilse Lafer (Head of the HGB Gallery).

As part of the graduation ceremony on 11 July at the HGB Leipzig, Stephan Zerbe and Ulf Jung from the board of the Rössing Foundation will award the Rössing Prize for Photography 2025. The Rössing Prize is awarded every two years by the Rössing Foundation among the graduates of the Photography programme at the HGB and is endowed with three prizes of €1,000.

On the opening day, the HGB will once again celebrate its traditional summer party, which this year will be organised by media art students. The programme includes live acts and DJ sets by and with HGB students, bars and food (see below).

The inner courtyard will be used by the Photography and Moving Image class of Prof Tina Bara and Sandra Schubert with the exhibition States of uncertain domesticities.

On the Saturday and Sunday of the tour: childcare at the Radical Kidz SpAce.

Live programme during the tour:

Saturday, 12.07. Hanako Emden: my (w)holeReading, 19:00 Room 1.9.

Diploma exhibitions at external locations:

Morten Bjerre: Threshold Magic, Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig (garden), exhibition: 11 June - 24 August 2025

Chiara Hofmann: How fast the wind turns, Leipzig District Court / Schwurgerichtssal, exhibition: 19 June - 5 September 2025

Till Hunger: Endless Roller Roaster, Kunsthalle.Ost, exhibition: 27.06.-25.07.2025

Theresa Münnich: RESONATING REVOLUTION, Cinémathèque Leipzig, exhibition: 02-13 July 2025

Anna Perepechai: Tears of Things, Techne Sphere, exhibition: 03-07 July 2025

Karolina Koßmann: From behind through the chest into the eye, Kunstraum Ortloff, exhibition: 03.07.-01.08.2025

Gustav Körnig: blume blume // 3000, WESTSIDE Galerie Kleindienst, exhibition: 04.07.-02.08.2025

Bob Jones, a&o Kunsthalle, exhibition: 03 - 12 July 2025

Felix Lorenz: Inventar, Techne Sphere (gallery space 1), exhibition: 06-07 July 2025

Lydia Marx: Little Pictures, G2 (Schaulager), exhibition: 08.07.-27.07.2025

Ronny Aviram: Werde ich zu einer Salzsäule, Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig, exhibition: 11 July - 24 August 2025


Bars & Food:

The HGB Summer Festival and the Diploma Tour will once again be accompanied by class bars, Küfas and great local partners:

Illu-Bar, System-Bar and Emergency-Bar for Installation and Space will be serving special drinks on a donation basis at the summer festival to keep the class coffers ringing.

Bar by Radical Kunst Force is organising Soli-Küfa for Ukraine with home-made food and drinks.

FRUCHT KITCHEN offers bagel sandwiches in different versions with toppings from their own production. There will also be delicious cakes on Saturday and Sunday.

In the ExCafé, the Café Europa with Bar & Exhibition opens for the Diploma Tour in collaboration with the Erasmus students of the HGB.

Café Mitsu provides summer festival and tour visitors with speciality coffee from small organic farmers' cooperatives from direct local imports.

Frittenfroide sells fries and collects donations for queer refugees.

Grimms Eismärchen refreshes young and old with vegan handmade ice cream specialities.

opening hours:
Fri.: 16:00-22:00, Sat: 14:00-21:00, Sun.: 12:00-18:00

Venue:
HGB, ExCafé

The international group of exchange students from all disciplines in the ERASMUS programme is organising this year's exhibition not in the Festsaal, but in the increasingly student-self-managed former café of the HGB - the ExCafé.

A group exhibition entitled "Café Europa" is being held there, which is both an exhibition project and a social space.

"Café Europa" is not just a title, but also a concept: the students are expanding the classic exhibition format to include a collective, culinary practice. The result is a space for transcultural exchange and encounters.

During the summer festival and the Diploma Tour 2025, the ExCafé will become a collective infrastructure in which artistic works and communal cooking and sharing will take place side by side and interact with each other. The exhibition invites you to linger, to talk, to pause.

Curated by Janne Steinhardt and Tobi Fabek.

Venue:
Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
Wächterstraße 11
04107 Leipzig


Parallel to the Dipom tour, the photography and moving image class is showing its contribution to the exhibition "States of uncertain domestics", which was on display at Haus Kunst Mitte from January to March 2025. In the two inner courtyards of the HGB, printed fabric panels are installed like flags from the inside to the outside of the façade from the windows. The photographic motifs reflect the theme of "home". "States of uncertain domestics" traces the multi-layered contexts surrounding the theme of house and home and also explores the shifts in meaning of recent decades.

opening hours:
Tue-Fri 2pm-7pm, Sat 11am-4pm

Venue:
akanthus galerie im westwerk
Karl-Heine-Straße 89
04229 Leipzig

Opening in the presence of the artist
Jutta Penndorf

Dietrich Burger studied at the HGB Leipzig under Bernhard Heisig and was a professor in the undergraduate painting programme for many years.

opening hours:
Sat. 14:00-21:00, Sun. 12:00-18:00

Venue:
Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
Wächterstraße 11
04107 Leipzig


After the summer festival celebration on Friday, the Radical Kidz SpAce will take over the courtyard of the east wing of the HGB in front of the "Café Europa" for two days. The initiative creates an open space for children - and for anyone who wants to play, create or collectively hang out. Situational, open formats are created: There will be splashing around, face painting, eating, painting, dancing and much more. The exact schedule will be announced later. The Radical Kidz SpAce sees itself as an artistic-social practice that makes care work visible and tests forms of participation and encounters within the HGB.

Participating artists:
Lennert Arnold, Len Bay, Felix Ebersbach, Marie Charlotte Elsner, Kreatur Studio, Kim Camille Kreuz / Vanessa Kahl / Kaya Leonie Pilsner
Curated by Lara Popp

Venue:
Galerie KUB
Kantstr. 18
04275 Leipzig

Digital spaces have long been shaping our perception of bodies, identities and social relationships. The group exhibition Don't break my decellularised pig's heart examines these shifts and addresses how digital structures affect our physical realities, often quietly but profoundly, between the physical body and virtual projection, between collective memory and individual fragility. The focus is on the interface between digitality and carnality, i.e. the body as a projection surface for algorithmic control, economic interests and ideological reinterpretations. The positions draw on various media: Installation, sculpture, painting, video, performance and sound.

Don't break my decellularised pig's heart invites us not only to talk about bodies in the digital age, but also to make them visible in all their fragility, projection and political influences.

Participating artists:
Nathalie Valeska Schüler, Karl-Heinz Adler, Sibylle Bergemann, Kurt Dornis, Markus Draper, Seiichi Furuya, Peter Herrmann, Sebastian Jung, Gisela Kurkhaus-Müller, Harald Metzkes, Sabine Moritz, Henrike Naumann, Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, Manfred Pernice, Uwe Pfeifer, Sonya Schönberger, Wenke Seemann, Robert Seidel, Christian Thoelke, Stephen Willats, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt among others

opening hours:
Wed-Mon 10-19 h

Venue:
DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam
Max-Planck-Straße 17
14473 Potsdam

In autumn 2025, DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam is showing the exhibition Wohnkomplex. Art and Life in Prefabricated Housing. In this group exhibition, guest curator Kito Nedo explores the question of how East German prefabricated housing estates are negotiated in art.

Wohnkomplex is showing around 50 works by artists:Karl-Heinz Adler, Sibylle Bergemann, Kurt Dornis, Markus Draper, Seiichi Furuya, Peter Herrmann, Sebastian Jung, Gisela Kurkhaus-Müller, Harald Metzkes, Sabine Moritz, Henrike Naumann, Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, Manfred Pernice, Uwe Pfeifer, Sonya Schönberger, Nathalie Valeska Schüler, Wenke Seemann, Robert Seidel, Christian Thoelke, Stephen Willats, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and others.

The exhibition presents installations, paintings, drawings, photographs and films created since the 1970s. In the exhibition, Kito Nedo brings together works that view and categorise prefabricated housing differently - as a place to live, as a symbol of social utopias and as a projection screen for social change. The focus is not only on prefabricated housing as an architectural legacy, but also as a cultural resonance space that raises questions about belonging, community and memory. The exhibition dovetails artistic works with socio-political issues and reflects on how urban spaces affect lifestyles and social structures.

Wohnkomplex opens up new perspectives on a building and living model that continues to have an impact today. Originally, prefabricated housing was the centrepiece of GDR social policy, a place of socialisation and a symbol of real socialist progress - until 1990. After the end of the GDR, it became the scene of painful transformations and a symbol of social decline and racist violence. As modern ruins, the buildings awaited demolition, were renovated or remodelled. The prefabricated blocks never became a monument, but remained a living presence. It is a place of remembrance of the GDR where living continues.