Since April 2025, nine students have formed the first group of the newly established PhD in Art Practice program at the HFBK Hamburg. Here, the fellows present their research projects:

Dariia Kuzmych: Temporalities of recovery (working title)

Supervision: Prof. Kader Attia (HFBK Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Sophie Witt (University of Hamburg)

Annihilating war and expansive terror of Russia have been transforming the artistic practice of Ukrainian artists. Generally, I am interested in art boundaries and transitions, in translating art into actions with tangible effects. My project explores the lived experiences of people after combat actions, those who were at the frontline and have been sustaining the line with their own bodies. They have multiple visible and invisible injuries. Their bodies are maimed, and they have been undergoing incessant psychological distress. Their wounds, losses, and grief have been inscribed in the biography of their resistance, in the structure of their own self. In my project, alongside war veterans, I study the temporalities of Russo-Ukrainian war as they manifest in individual recovery paths. The coexistence of annihilating and reconstructive processes within these paths reflects the specific character of abrupt changes caused by war. How does time reveal itself through human action, the body, and its transformation? What is written in people’s bodies when they risk themselves against expansive terror? History is etched into missing limbs, into a contraction of combat experience absorbed by the body. The time’s nature discloses itself through ruptures, losses, pain, renewal, recovery, and restructuring—through the onset of the new. Abrupt changes disrupt the old order and let a new one emerge. The routine of recovery and transformation—its wonders and losses—spills out in tiny gestures, in phrases, in actions of redefinition towards the usual roles of one’s own body while adapting to prostheses. I’m interested in those bridges into a new reality, the forecast of transformation: a joke, an unforeseen gesture, an unexpected, which could be uncovered only in such conditions. I’ve been building the project's framework through participative workshops with war veterans to tackle these dimensions of traumatic experiences through interdisciplinary lectures in collaboration with psychologists, followed by discussions, drawing, image-making, and reflections on own and group general themes: How can an image provoke a transformative experience? How can images created with others serve as departure points for such experiences? How can images facilitate self-restructuring? How can one’s experiences be represented without flattening the pain of others? How can they not only be represented but reimagined and transformed? At which moment can symbolic or processual encounters become transformative, accumulating through images? The project, as it tries to account for those experiences emerging at the threshold of the pains' inexpressibility and its craving to be expressed, requires patience for learning from beyond by witnessing steps from vain to emergence. Inevitably, it raised the question of who can speak on whose behalf.

Helene Kummer: More-Than-Human Drama (working title)

Supervision: Prof. Jeanne Faust (HFBK Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Sophie Witt (University of Hamburg)

Cartoon characters and screen creatures are always involved in our encounters with animals. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they influence, confuse, and distort our ideas and knowledge about the lives and ways of non-human animals. While the “Bambi effect” describes, among other things, an increased sensitivity to wild animals and a rejection of hunting in response to cute cartoon characters, productions such as Finding Nemo (2003) and Rascal the Raccoon (1977) had the opposite effect. The affection for the main characters led to a demand for live clownfish and raccoons as pets, which had real consequences for the animal groups and the health of entire ecosystems. These specific, but also less obvious, examples of media-induced animal popularity and the accompanying misconceptions form the basis of my artistic research. “Both scientific and popular thought tend towards the conclusion that there are ultimately single answers to single questions. What is intelligence? Who possesses it? Where do they fit into our rigid structures and hierarchies of thought and dominion? Perhaps—whisper it—this just isn't how the world works.”[1] Not only films but also scientific studies, cosmologies, and “world-making projects” [2] shape our relationships with mice, forests, and seeds. Many of these research findings and fictions feature the subjectivity of more-than-human[3] life merely as entities subordinate to humans, exploiting their resources, unique skills, and appearances to instrumentalize them as puppets and props for anthropocentric narratives. This double invisibility further alienates us from the ecological interdependencies that form the basis for collective survival. [4] “But awareness of the sensuous existence of other life forms doesn't have to involve big ideas or actions. How about just visiting your local garden center to smell the plants?”[5] This doctoral project focuses on the medium of animated film and examines the dramaturgical, linguistic, and aesthetic forms of the animal, as well as the respective media-specific modes of play. Following in the footsteps of popular animal characters, many unexpected encounters, stories, and connections can be found. These dialogues and surprising interconnections form the framework for a series of cinematic and installation works that bring together the potentials and practices of documentary film (observing, listening, recording) and 3D animation (extracting, imagining, embodying). “In order for animals and their agency to become visible in history, it makes sense to ‘give them stories’ and tell their stories.”[6] Following Jessica Ullrich and Alexandra Böhm, the project also experiments with the idea of helping animal characters achieve a rebellious self through compassionate and responsible storytelling. The associated ambivalent dynamics of anthropomorphism[7] and anthropocentrism are accepted as a welcome challenge for artistic research at the margins of rational scientific logic.

Johannes Büttner: Longevity (working title)

Supervision: Prof. Simon Denny (HFBK Hamburg) and Prof Dr. Steffen Köhn (Aarhus University)

My artistic research project investigates a growing community of longevity activists whose ambition is to overcome the biological limitations of human life and defeat death through advanced medical science. These actors—entrepreneurs, biohackers, scientists, venture capitalists—mobilize financial and intellectual resources to fund experimental research projects worldwide. Notably, they rely on blockchain-based mechanisms for funding, governance, and community-building, combining biotechnological ambition with decentralized technological infrastructures. Blockchain here is not merely a financial tool, but also an organizational framework to bypass traditional regulatory structures and accelerate innovation. Because many treatments envisioned by this community—gene editing, anti-aging pharmacology, cryonics, mind-uploading—lack legal sanction or face prolonged approval processes, the movement seeks new legal and territorial configurations. These include free private cities, special economic zones, and extraterritorial enclaves, where governance is defined by private contracts and market relations. The aspiration is not only to advance biomedical innovation, but to experiment with alternative societal arrangements shaped by libertarian and anarcho-capitalist principles. Methodologically, the project combines participatory field research and observational cinema with an innovative film-within-a-film structure. The protagonists are not only observed but also invited to co-create a fictional narrative, developing a parallel script that dramatizes their imagined futures. This process is organized through a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), which serves as both conceptual and operational infrastructure. The DAO allows participants to collectively propose, vote on, and shape the creative direction, embedding blockchain-based decision-making into the production. This approach explores how decentralized models might function in collaborative artistic contexts and how they mirror the governance experiments within the longevity community. The final film is displayed using obsolete cryptocurrency mining rigs repurposed as media players. Each rig contributes a fragment of the overall video, resulting in fragmented playback, stuttering, and varying image quality. The rigs communicate over a local network, assembling a composite of all data processed by each unit. This presentation mode highlights the interplay between speculative technological visions and material infrastructures.

Maria Ignatenko: In Praise of the Whip*

Supervision: Prof. Adina Pintilie (HFBK Hamburg)

In Praise of the Whip* is an artistic exploration that encompasses cinematic practice, film theory and social work. It explores possibilities of radical reconfiguration of erotic arousal, imagination and transgression, through an aesthetic and political lens. The main focus of my research is the experience of the body as a “surface” inscribed with traces of landscapes, political acts, and intimate wounds. These traces require close examination. They hold more evidence than any archive and more articulated sensation than any confession. This experience is unique to each individual and bound to the mystery of their body. What attracts me is how radical materiality, corporeality can become an image of film. I ask myself if it is possible to create a cinematic space where the transgressive experience of the body can be located and transformed through the work of imagination. I wonder how to bridge the narrative structure of the film and erotic desire in its affective, rebellious, non-structured, but intimate form. As part of my PhD project, I am conducting research focused on how the body changes when facing different social, cultural, and political landscapes. I am interested in the experience of a body situated in the rupture between desire and impossibility of realizing it. One of the main participants in my project, Lertulo (which means “a person who can do everything” in Esperanto), is a non-binary person, a professional builder, and a model. They are in a complex relationship with their body and desires. Lertulo construct and transform their body through interactions with building materials that require extraordinary physical strength from them. These materials literally shape Lertoulo, as well as the political landscape, which plays its own repressive, constraining role. On the other hand, as an actress and model, Lertulo has a completely different virtual experience, devoid of a material component. For me, as a filmmaker, it is an experience of perceiving another person in his otherness, his radical separateness. What does this virtual (cinematic) experience offer to Lertulo? And how can it be analyzed within the framework of our collaborative process? I am currently at the beginning of my research, which is intended to include several parts and interwoven narrative lines. I hope that during the program I will be able to shape my own artistic research methodology and to develop it through cinematographic practice.

Michal Baror: The ethical and poetical healing potential of the photographic—ethnographic archive. The case of the ‘The Man and His Work Center’ at Eretz Israel Museum.

Supervision: Prof. Omer Fast (HFBK Hamburg) and Dr. Hagit Keysar (Bezalel Academy Bethlehem)

This project seeks to develop a comprehensive investigation into the power dynamics involved in the processes of collecting, archiving, and presenting historical and ethnographic nomadic photographs, which directly or indirectly shape national and colonial consciousness. Exploring historical collections in my birthplace of Palestine-Israel through the prism of settler colonialism allows me to see hidden stories that haunt our collective memories and present. An increasing number of studies have analyzed the history and present of the State of Israel through the lens of the settler colonialism paradigm.[8] In settler colonial processes, a group of migrants takes control of a space populated by an indigenous group, gradually shifting the demographic balance in favor of the settlers through mechanisms of dispossession, expulsion, or elimination. The “logic of elimination” of the indigenous population—namely, their replacement by settlers and the appropriation of their land—is a critical component of settler colonial projects aimed at permanent settlement. The research site of this project is the ethnographic photo collection housed at the “Man and His Work Center” in the Eretz Israel Museum. The collection includes photographs of workers, traditional tools, and ethnographic objects, most of which depict indigenous Palestinians—a fact unacknowledged in the collection or exhibits. In doing so, the museum and the collection simultaneously take part in constructing a Zionist state-building narrative or “returning to work the land” while masking and silencing the narratives of this land's previous inhabitants—Palestinian land workers. My focus will be on the photograph as an object open to multiple interpretations—considering its subject, materiality, cataloging, and status within the museum. I am interested in exploring how photographs created for one purpose can in fact preserve a diversity of stories and cultures. That is, how the photograph, enlisted for the colonial narrative, can, through a renewed reading, also tell the indigenous story. I propose a multi-faceted approach to this inquiry. This includes conducting research that critically reads the “Man and His Work Center” and its collections through colonialist theories, thereby addressing the dual narrative in the preservation and erasure of Palestinian agrarian culture. In parallel, I will undertake a documentation project to capture the cataloging process by curators working with unannotated photograph boxes. The editing will emphasize the discrepancies between the images and the narratives imposed upon them, questioning how archives construct knowledge. Furthermore, I will engage in artistic practice by recontextualizing archival photographs through a photo-based installation. Finally, although the collection is housed in a Zionist museum, I aim to conceptualize a display space, be it official or pirate, that allows the collection to be exposed to diverse narratives and researchers. Through these strategies, the research seeks not only to uncover hidden narratives but also to foster dialogue toward reconciliation with the traumas of the past, as a means to healing.

Pablo Torres Gómez: Volumetric Ecophonies. Desedimenting Echoes in Deep Time

Supervision: Prof. Rajkamal Kahlon (HFBK Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Yvonne Wilhelm (ZHdK)

“(…) these voices are, in fact, sediments that we are called to auscultate and unearth, to question and subvert [which] not only reveal the persistence of the past [but also] its accumulation within futures that begin with us right now.”—Cristina Rivera Garza, Escrituras Geológicas, 2022[9]

To conceive geology as a form of Earth writing is to recognize it not as a field of neutral description, but as a mode of inscription—one that organizes material reality, temporal experience, and planetary life through specific regimes of power and knowledge. As Kathryn Yusoff argues, the classification of matter has historically operated through geographic dislocation, severing land, place, and personhood from their relational entanglements.[10] Along this line, the origins of geology (and its consolidation as a colonial and racialized practice) are inseparable from a regime of material power that underpins extraction, dispossession, and settler modes of land apprehension. What, then, are the material writing practices of geology, and how have they contributed to the erasure of other modes of planetary sense-making? How might we reflect on the environmental origins of political violence by examining the ways geology inscribes certain earths while displacing others? How can we begin to engage with the suppressed relationalities, temporalities, and territorial imaginaries that geology has rendered silent? Drawing on Cristina Rivera Garza’s practice of desedimentation, Volumetric Ecophonies is a process of unsettling and unlearning modern geological imagination. It does so by engaging with the subterranean as a space where silenced voices and marginalized imaginaries endure as sedimented temporalities through matter’s permanence. These are experiences of pasts and futures that hold possibilities for relational modes of co-existence beyond geology’s flattening plateau. Working across translocal geographies—specifically between Germany and the so-called “mining corridor” in northern Colombia—, the process follows the trajectories and frictions of coal, copper, and gold. As extensions and feral agents of subterranean relations, these minerals carry the weight of extraction, displacement, and contested ecological life. Volumetric Ecophonies borrows the notion of ecophonies from the ancient medical practice of auscultation, in which internal resonances of the body are perceived through the modulation of the voice. The process crafts sound-based interfaces that propose listening as a medium for earthly sense-making, auscultating and activating exchanges with the material, affective, and political formations silenced by extractive regimes. In doing so, it shifts engagement from logics of quantification to modes of resonance that attend and attune with the frictional, porous, and interdependent dynamics through which subterranean Earths resound.

Ruixin Liu: conversational objects

Supervision: Prof. Rajkamal Kahlon and Prof. Dr. Jesko Fezer (both HFBK Hamburg)

My method begins with organizing workshops that use negative affects and emotions as guiding tools to explore and examine what is often avoided, prioritizing minoritarian perspectives, particularly from a queer feminist viewpoint, while maintaining a ground of commonality. The starting point of the workshop is shame. On an individual level, shame is an affect that prevents people from speaking; on a larger scale, shame mediates between the self and the community. It is an unavoidable part of the process of identification. In this sense, it can be used as an aesthetic tool to renegotiate consensus. Thus, it has the potential to reorganize space and redefine what the space can hold. The workshops are a response to my personal desire to go beyond the limits of private conversations with friends, which are constrained by limited resources and boundaries. By expanding these private discussions into workshops and collaborating with communities across Germany and beyond, we can uncover new perspectives together. In the workshops, we analyze the functioning of power, work through internalized oppression and cynicism, challenge conventional notions of difference as separative or as an excuse for maintaining the status quo, and challenge the idea that the conflict it generates is necessarily highly intense and disruptive. By slowing down these conversations, the workshops open up space for allyship and aim to restore genuine hope and empowerment. Some workshops are documented to capture the energies of the workshops. This documentation offers a new vision of empowerment—one that acknowledges bodily experiences and emotions as a starting point of knowledge. It also serves as a reflective tool, giving what has been discussed in the workshop another opportunity to be processed. Beyond the role of moderator and listener, it creates the position of observer. It also opens up a new space for viewers to become potential participants and collaborators. Content-wise, it contributes to the workshop’s conceptual development, mapping out potential discursive fields where concrete socio-political issues can be addressed. Based on the documentary footage, other media such as 3D animation will be added to introduce a subjective layer, combining to transform overlooked sensations into shared knowledge. In general, I’m interested in developing an open process and space for thinking and feeling with others, where reflection is structurally enabled—where community work can be connected with the personal, the boundary between participatory experience and collaborative experience is blurred, and transformative experience can be communicated and thus made possible.

Tang Han: Rhizoming Wind

Supervision: Prof. Angela Bulloch (HFBK Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Sophie Witt (University of Hamburg)

Rhizoming Wind focuses on the plant Gastrodia elata to tell a story of how knowledge, plants, climate, and bodies encounter each other. Gastrodia elata is a saprophytic perennial herb in the Orchidaceae family, characterized by its lack of roots and green leaves, which renders it unable to perform photosynthesis. Instead, it survives symbiotically with the fungus Armillaria mellea, relying on fungal hyphae to invade decaying wood and provide the nutrients essential for its survival. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the rhizome of Gastrodia elata has been employed for centuries to manage “diseases of wind,” such as strokes, headaches, and other neurological disorders. Wind is considered the most elusive and mobile of the Six Evils, often combining with other elements to cause wind-related illnesses. How can we understand and define this more-than-general “wind” that resides within the body? From an essential TCM perspective, the human body is viewed as an open system, constantly interacting with both external and internal environments. It is approached as a black box—receiving inputs and generating outputs—where interactions with the environment form a complex, dynamic system, a kind of cybernetic mechanism. As early as the Huangdi Neijing, literally the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor, there are mentions of the “Five Movements and Six Qi” which is a theory that links climate and periodic life-cycle phenomena, connecting nature, humans, and disease mechanisms—climate, phenology and syndrome are mutually promoted. Inspired by Deleuze`’s and Guattari’s concept of non-hierarchical, interconnected knowledge systems, this research traces the imaginative trajectory of wind through a rhizomatic methodology. It investigates how this external force might enter the human body, disrupt its internal equilibrium, and how plant-based interventions—such as Gastrodia elata—may assist in its expulsion. It’s also about the dynamic balance between internal (body) and external (climate) environments. Rather than seeking specific targets, treatments, and therapies, how might we center systemic, holistic or preventative views and mindset as strategies to avert crises? As Donna Haraway articulates in her book Staying with the Trouble: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”

Viki Kühn: Violence Against Women—Trauma Processing in Art and Film

Supervision: Prof. Angela Schanelec and Prof. Adina Pintilie (both HFBK Hamburg)

In my research project, I explore the representation and processing of violence against women in moving images, with a special focus on traumatic experiences within intimate relationships. My aim is to investigate how artistic media can be used to make trauma visible and open new ways of communication. I examine how authenticity and reconstruction contribute to trauma processing and what possibilities reenacting real experiences offer for reinterpreting the past. A central concern of my work is to make the physical and psychological effects of violence visible and tangible. I critically engage with common ideas of healing as well as physical and emotional well-being, questioning how these concepts can be expanded and rethought in a society undergoing significant change. I understand health not merely as a medical condition, but as a culturally shaped and complex concept. My interdisciplinary approach combines film practice with theoretical reflection, aiming to create artistic spaces where traumatic experiences can be worked through and renegotiated. Through this perspective, I seek to develop new frameworks that reveal the often hidden traces of violence against women and contribute to a broader understanding of health. Furthermore, I am interested in how art—especially through film—can address social power structures and deeply rooted systems of violence against women. My goal is to open aesthetic and discursive spaces where wounds can be named without exploitation, and where healing is understood as an open, multifaceted process. With this research project, I want to raise awareness of the impacts of violence against women while also strengthening artistic forms of expression that go beyond mere documentation and hold transformative potential.

This interview was first published in the magazine Lerchenfeld #75.

Footnotes:

[1] James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The search for a Planetary Intelligence, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2022.

[2] “World-making projects” describes how humans and non-human beings create new worlds together through fragile, unpredictable, and collaborative processes, often in the midst of ecological and social crises. (cf. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015.

[3] The term “more-than-human world” refers to a way of thinking that seeks to overcome the separation between humans and nature. It was first introduced in 1996 by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Today, the term has gained popularity through James Bridle's Ways of Being (see note 1), among others.

[4] Anna Tsings concept of “collaborative survival” describes how different species, including humans, create new possibilities for life through mutual dependencies and cooperation in uncertain environments characterized by destruction and precariousness in order to survive together. (cf. note 2)

[5] Timothy Morton, Being Ecological, MIT Press, 2018.

[6] Jessica Ullrich, Alexandra Böhm (eds.), Tierstudien, Neofelis, 16/2019.

[7] “Anthropomorphism” refers to the humanization of animals for purposes such as entertainment.

[8] Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures, Stanford University Press, 2023.

[9] Cristina Rivera Garza, Escrituras Geológicas, Iberoamericana, 2022, p. 14 [translation by the author].

[10] Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2019, p. 2.