Rundgang 2026

Congratulations to the winners of the HGB Study Award 2025/26:

Robin Becker (Media Art)
Hyerin Eom (Media Art)
Lam Funke (Photography)
Janne Steinhardt (Painting / Printmaking)
Meta Weckeßer (Book design / Graphic design)

This year, the jury selected five works from 98 submissions. The winners will each receive prize money of €2,000. This is the 19th time that the Friends of the HGB and Sparkasse Leipzig have announced the HGB Study Award. Applications were open to HGB students of all disciplines who have not yet registered for their diploma and are not Meister-students.

While working on her novel GRM, Sybille Berg spent two years talking to experts from a wide range of disciplines – systems biologists, neuropsychologists, cognitive scientists, marine ecologists, conflict and violence researchers. About the state of affairs in their fields, and about ideas for a future that doesn’t look like a nightmare. [From: Sybille Berg: Nerds retten die Welt (Nerds Save the World). Conversations with those who know. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne, 2020]

The interviews from Nerds retten die Welt are the starting point for a typographical and design implementation in the courses Typography and manual typesetting, as well as Desktop Publishing. The work in letterpress was linked to Robert Schmiedel’s workshop etching with students of the 2nd year of Buchkunst/Grafik design, who printed illustrations to accompany the interviews.

With “(ge)schichten — mehrfach spürbar” we explore the presence and absence of thoughts, memories, and notions of the future.

What remains visible, what disappears?
Does something disappear because it is no longer visible?
What happens when the old is overwritten by the new?
We invite you to join us in observing the emergence of a changing image.

Embodied Analogies unfolds as a constellation of works that understand the archive not as a storage of the past, but as a living, breathing body. Here, memory is not fixed; it is baked, performed, scanned, dressed, coded, fermented, and re-enacted.

The students of Klasse Ehrenstein treat history as something wet, unstable, and relational: an alive-archive that circulates through friendship, ritual, pop culture, fiction, and care. Instead of starting with a theme, Embodied Analogies was shaped through a relational group curatorial process that let meaning emerge between works.

Across the exhibition, bodies emerge as interfaces. They are technical and posthuman, ritualistic and vulnerable, playful and resistant. Dresses become performances, umbilical cords become borders, ball pools become somatic memory, QR codes become seductive portals. The body is not a subject to be represented, but a medium through which data, emotion, ecology, and politics are processed.

Time, in Embodied Analogies, is queer. It is geological, glitchy, cyclical, and mythological rather than linear. Intimacy is never confessional; it is mediated through objects, archives, rituals, algorithms, friendships and it is carrying an insistence on justice and a refusal of the violences that shape whose lives are allowed to matter.

What connects these works is not sameness, but a shared commitment to worlding: to inventing aesthetic forms that hold complexity, contradiction, and tenderness at once.

With Contributions from Genesis Kahveci Charlie Breisig (Jungfrau) Max Grund Sarah Letalik Luki Haak Viyan Kalayci Toto wolsky Nikita Serebriakov Liva Voigt Jonna Baumann Irem Özkürkcü Genesis Kahveci klara stangl Okezi Iteire Raga Rahman Florence Kallenborn Leif Klinger Nadine Aber Elina Averbukh Lis Schmidt

The starting point for the works on display is the three-day workshop “Recollecting Futures” with artist Vanessa Opoku. During the workshop, participants spent two days exploring the Botanical Garden of the City of Leipzig and discussing how this institution organizes and narrates. Botanical gardens collect, exhibit, and serve narratives—just like museums, and just like we do as artists. They tell stories with what and how they collect, organize, and display. But who decides what is collected? Whose stories are told? The technologies we use—cameras, scanners, digital archives—were often developed for surveillance and control. How can we reinterpret these tools and use them for other narratives? What does collecting mean in times of collapse, crisis, and regeneration? What stories can we tell that do not reinforce existing power dynamics, but speak of and explore other futures?

With works by Toto Wolsky, Fine Schröter, Jule Ehlenz, Mascha Breuer, Sarah Crameri, Lea Petry, Carla Maruscha Fellenz, Zina Bluhm, Shary Talebian, Haru Li Wdo, Nadine Aber, klara stangl, Sophie George, Dimitrios Mavroudis, Sally Alhindawi

A material mass that expands, resists and grows. The images emerge from repeated interventions within existing states and from an ongoing engagement with what is already visible. Layering, revisions and experimenting with materials allow painting, printmaking and drawing to be explored as open, experienced-based processes.

Every painting I've done has like 100 paintings under it. – Amy Sillman

The game starts right on time at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday in room 3.20. If you have forgotten your gym bag, please report to room 3.40. The lines outline the playing field. We play together and do not aim for the head. Water bottles can be refilled at the bar. If anything is unclear, the coaches are available on site. No one climbs on the stack of mats.

This is where we got lucky!
This is where we play and win!
This is where we are there for each other!

Feat. Staffel Verlag!

Presentation of the original graphic collection PASSAGE, which will be published in 2026 and is the result of a three-day letterpress workshop held by the class last year.

This is where there will also be a café for everyone again.

Different senses of time overlap inbetween. Traces left in the making, hesitations, brief pauses

small shifts, are at times concealed within the fabric, at times revealed, and at times allowed to hide themselves.

For this year’s Rundgang, the 2nd year Media Art students present a collaborative work on fabric.

Im Spiegel: Visuelle Kultur, Bildkunst, Lichthof, White Cube, Europa
Den Hörsinn umgibt die Aura des Anderen, Untergeordneten, Übersehenen
light shift
night view
Schwerkraft
eine Gruppe sucht sich zusammen, sucht das Einzelne, kommt zusammen, vereinzelt sich, sucht zusammen
bis plötzlich etwas anderes passiert
(live)On air and the ground
das Körperliche zwischen uns spricht
}}}}}fade{{{{{
news fade
in conversation
it's in the air tonight (live) 
Draußen bebt und demonstriert die Zeit
Question & Sound macht Sinn und lärmt
Wie klang seine Stimme?
Expanding sideways
A group is present 
hello?

The class for performative arts invites the public into social, physical and sonorous situations - by the fire, in the lift, in the class room. Solo and group performances give insights into the working process of performance as media art and challenge the perception of bodies, space and time. A radio transmission spreads audible traces of live performances on air. Throughout the Rundgang ephemeral performative moments spin a net of encounters that can neither be grasped nor repeated.

Program Schedule, R. 2.08

Thursday, February 12

7:30 p.m. Karaoke
9:30 p.m. Unexpected Services // Heather Koen

Friday, February 13

2:00 p.m. Group Scores // self-organized class project
3:00 p.m. (live) on air // transmission group, Anna Zeit & guests
4:00 p.m. Dinner // Soschka
6:00 p.m. 2 works: Dead Angle (work-in-progress) // Lotta Beckers +++ training unit(y) // Kaya Pilsner
8:00 p.m. Lose enden // DJ set: dots and lines

Saturday, February 14

12:00 place(less)ness / becoming a place // To Fabek
2:00 p.m. Group Scores // self-organized class project
2:30 p.m. Karaoke of Silence // Asya Volodina
3:30 p.m. (Half Dark Half Gold) // Aseem
4:30 p.m. A little demonstration // Andolie Marguerite
5:30 p.m. A Valley By The Red Shore // Heather Koen
6:00 p.m. Fireplace in the courtyard // Frida Schramm
6:00–7:30 p.m. Workshop: Echo West – Choir of Newcomers // Véra Marie Deubner, Luca Diebold
7:30 p.m. Performance: Echo West – Choir of Newcomers // Véra Marie Deubner, Luca Diebold
8:00 p.m. Lose enden // DJ set: Kaya + Soschka

Sunday, February 15

12:00 p.m. Nowness II // Rahel Scharabi
1:00 p.m. GIFT FOR HGB // Frida Schramm
2:00 p.m. Group Scores // self-organized class project
3:00 p.m. 3 works: BÄRformance // Caro Otto  +++ hysteric parade // Ziska +++  for arachne // Emma Toschka
5:00 p.m. Enden // Class for Performative Arts

Outside + Ongoing
Ongoing: Elevator Installation Service // Andolie Marguerite