Past Events

Viki Kühn, Mein halber Vater, AT/DE 2026, 92 Min.

Farina Mietchen, Hinterlegte Nummern, DE 2025, 20 Min.

Philipp Hartmann, Auf der Rückseite der Landschaft, DE 2026, 30 Min.

in Cooperation with HfK Bremen

Lectures by Tobias Zielony a.o.

Premiere on 28.10: Laura Elisabeth Staab, Du solltest träumen, dass du fliegst, DE 2026, 22 Min.

As part of Wer schnupft am Schönsten? at HFBK boutique, Elisa Maria Zeisler constructs a room that houses an immersive installation. The installation draws on the extensive history of Bavarian snuff tobacco clubs (Schnupftabakmeisterschaften), tracing back to the 1960s – a community the artist entered by founding her own club in 2024 in Hamburg. Bringing the neon-coloured sports jerseys of her club into the microcosm of an old-fashioned Bavarian tavern, richly decorated with embroidered cloths and taxidermy trophies and populated by men in Lederhosen, Zeisler opens a dialogue between tradition and novelty. The work reflects on the tension between the scene’s conservative, patriarchal undercurrents and the voices of a younger generation.

The set itself becomes the subject of the work through its spatial arrangement: half of the exhibition space remains empty, revealing the otherwise hidden back of the set. This makes the set visible as a construction and, at the same time, exposes the boundary between the depicted world and its staging.

The video work shown alongside the installation documents the artist’s journey into the world of snuff tobacco clubs, driven by her long-standing interest in stepping into psychological and physical spaces usually hidden from the general public. Zeisler’s artistic practice recreates these niche spaces within a gallery, allowing viewers to step inside and experience them firsthand.

Agony is as much misery as passion. During this colloquium we will discuss questions of design practice and artistic research with software as material. While recently the artificial has become synonymous with AI, processes of imitation and simulation have long been crucial to creating. With presentations by invited guests and room for discussion, Artificial Agony attempts to reposition processes of making and critical investigation in a time when the artificial has become synonymous with the unreal and agony is the torment of creation under prompt-efficiency. As a counter argument, artificial agony offers space to debate software as material in all its possibilities.

Organised by Klasse Digitale Grafik (Prof. Christoph Knoth and Prof. Konrad Renner) with Simone C Niquille

This event is part of the ARTILACS graduate school.

Artist Talk: 25.⁠ ⁠Oktober 2026, 15 Uhr

Im Rahmen Bildungs- und Aktionswochen gegen Antisemitismus

Anmeldung bis Di., 6.10. hiererforderlich

Or a performative library of discrete knowledge for voice and Samotryas

Panofsky, Soap, and Underwear is a performative reading and sound work by Absent Institution for the Extended Library of the HFBK Hamburg. Its starting point is an inventory list of things compiled during a performative expedition in 2020.⁠ ⁠This list is understood not as a private travel document or a conventional archive, but as a discrete form of knowledge: books, soap, clothing, food, documents, art-historical printouts, tools, sound equipment, and bodily traces appear side by side as a fragmented library of lived experience.

During the evening, the list is activated as a score. The voice reads a sequence of things, numbers, and descriptions; Samotryas — a self-built electric string instrument made from a branch, a string, nails, stones, and contact microphones — holds a continuous field of vibration and resonance. In this way, a temporary library emerges from voice, sound, things, memory, and attention.

A Symposium on Eco-Social World-Shaping
Study Department Design, HFBK Hamburg

Language: German/English
Free admission

Design has a social impact. It shapes and transforms the world in which we live. The social and ecological consequences of this far-reaching practice manifest themselves today as a crisis of democracy and an environmental catastrophe. This dramatic convergence demands that we understand reality not merely as the external environment that surrounds us, but as a network of people, organisms, policies, and objects in which we are embedded.

What would a relational understanding of the “Mitwelt” look like, one in which ecological responsibility is inseparably linked to social justice? How can creative practice gently participate in these co-worldly relationships and take a partisan stance within them?

Together with guests from the fields of art, sociology, design, architecture, performance, activism, and theory, we will discuss possibilities for eco-social practice to explore, endure, and transform our present as a “co-world.”

Participants: Silke van Dyk (Jena), Folke Köbberling (Braunschweig), Atelier LeBalto (Berlin), Loraine Leeson (London), Katja Lonzeck (Hamburg), Sasha Perera (Berlin / London), Tilman Walther (Hamburg), Sabine Zahn (Berlin), Daniela Zyman (Vienna)

Organized by Friedrich von Borries, Johanna Dehio, Anne Femmer, Jesko Fezer, and Anne Duk Hee Jordan.

As part of the symposium, the workshop “Körperliche Raumproduktion” will take place.

The program consists of five interrelated sections:

1. MhVkTwadWELTe (or: Sometimes talks don’t have titles, but aim to explain the WORLD)
   Talk by Friedrich von Borries

   World, Environment, Shared World. Big words. How can one reflect on them if one practices design theory rather than philosophy? What is this discipline’s specific approach? And what does “world” have to do with distinguishing the “global” from the “planetary”? Drawing on his books “Designing the World: A Political Theory of Design” and “Architecture in the Anthropocene: A Speculative Archaeology”—and a new research project with the working title “Holy Shit”—Friedrich von Borries reflects aloud on the limits and possibilities of design, design history, and design theory in the face of global transformation processes.

2. Making Contact—“Practicing Beginnings”
   Workshop and Performative Situation by Johanna Dehio, Sabine Zahn, and Tilman Walther

   Building on the work done during the foundational year at the HFBK, design is understood as an open, exploratory process that emerges from observation, experimentation, and exchange. The focus is on the conditions of beginning: How do we make contact with one another? How do trust, a shared capacity for action, and responsibility arise? How does an open process become a practice—and how does it position itself within social and ecological contexts? What do we need to learn or unlearn, and how can we act for ourselves rather than reproduce established positions? Together with Sabine Zahn and Tilman Walther, this presentation explores environmental design as a relational practice between the body, space, and the public sphere. The symposium becomes a shared space of experience: thinking is understood not as a purely linguistic process, but as a spatial and physical practice. Participants are active contributors; shared guiding questions connect guests and the audience in the process of thinking.

3. From the Inside Out
   Talk and Debate with Anne Femmer, Folke Köbberling, and Atelier LeBalto

   The past century has made us masters of detached design: The separation of (intellectual-creative) thinking and (physical-material) action made design plannable, delegable, and monetarily “tradable.” This concept of abstraction is now reaching its limits. Not least, New Materialism has challenged the notion of a passive and arbitrarily malleable world and directed our attention to the diverse interconnections between people, materials, and environments. Today, “predictability” confronts an increasingly fragmented, broken, and repair-needy world that can hardly be grasped—let alone shaped—from a distance.

   To remain capable of taking action, designers such as Folke Köbberling and atelier le balto repeatedly step beyond the boundaries of their profession and intervene in “realities” through practical, hands-on action. Together, we will discuss the potential of designing from the inside out: from the closest possible proximity to material flows, tools, and practices of transformation.

4. How to Postpone the End of the World (working title)
   Sound Intervention and Discussion with Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Sasha Perera, and Daniela Zyman

   Drawing on the ideas of Ailton Krenak, this event brings together perspectives from art, curatorial practice, and sound. Krenak is an Indigenous thinker, writer, environmental activist, and an important political voice in Brazil. He belongs to the Krenak people, who live in the Rio Doce region—a river that has been poisoned by one of Brazil’s worst environmental disasters. In his books, he critiques the notion that humans stand outside or above nature. Instead, he views rivers, mountains, animals, and plants as living kin and as part of a shared world. Together with Daniela Zyman and Sasha Perera, we explore how our understanding of the environment can shift toward a “shared world”—a world in which humans, animals, plants, microorganisms, and technologies live in mutual interdependence. Through conversation, sound, and shared reflection, we will explore alternative forms of coexistence, listening as a practice, and how art can open up new relationships with the living world.

5. The Politics of Community Design
   Statements and Discussion with Jesko Fezer, Silke van Dyk, and Loraine Leeson

   Of course, the environment is always (and perhaps above all) a social context. What connects and divides us are direct and mediated social practices, as well as materialized, subjectivized, and institutionalized social arrangements. The way these are shaped distributes opportunities and exclusions, abundance and scarcity, power and powerlessness. A critical and practical engagement with these powerful interrelationships requires new approaches to the social context of design: actors other than the usual ones must become partners in design processes. But are local communities suitable starting points for creatively addressing social reality? How can we join forces with those who have already begun to take action against these conditions? Together with community art pioneer Loraine Leeson and sociologist Silke van Dyk, we will discuss what an emancipatory relationship between design and local neighborhoods might look like—and what pitfalls neoliberal politics has set in its path.

The current opening hours of the library can be found here.

The exhibition of archival materials in the display cases of the HFBK Library opened on 25 June 2026.⁠ ⁠It accompanies the launch of Dr Alina Just’s newly published study Gestaltung und Gleichschritt. Die Geschichte der Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg im Nationalsozialismus (Forum Zeitgeschichte, Band 34, Metropol Verlag, Berlin, 2026) and offers a glimpse into the holdings of the university archives. With its focus on students, the exhibition aims both to emphasize this perspective and to highlight open research questions.

To demonstrate the potential of addressing this research gap, individual students affected by exclusion and persecution are presented as examples within this presentation. These are discoveries that have emerged unsystematically from research conducted in the university archive, primarily by external researchers. The reason for this lies in the historically evolved structure of the HFBK university archive: the student files are sorted in purely alphabetical order from 1905 to 1945—an extensive body of source material that has, in its entirety, remained completely unexplored to this day.

Through the seven case studies presented here—individuals whose life paths were severely impacted or even cut short by university expulsion, displacement, and deportation—the presentation aims to adopt the perspective of those who play a decisive role in shaping the essence of an art academy to this day: the students.

Concept: Sabine Boshamer, Marlene Kirsten, Julia Mummenhoff
Exhibition design and Reproductions: Tim Albrecht
Thank to: Dietrich Banse and Geschichtswerkstatt Uelzen, Peter Degkwitz, Corry Guttstadt, Alina Laura Just, Alisa Navot (Israel), Felix-Nussbaum-Gesellschaft (Osnabrück), Nora Sternfeld, Itamar Wexler (Tel Aviv), Ingo Wille.

With a guest lecture in English and the introduction of the new professors.

For all information regarding the start of the semester, please contact our new HFBK hotline: +49 (0)40 238582-119*

*The cost of this call to a German landline is subject to your phone provider’s rates.

Performance by Anja Dietmann, Nschotschi Haslinger, Gesa Troch + Special Guest: Philipp Joy Reinhardt as Night Watch

Lecture-Performance

with director Christian Hornung