The Grand Snail Tour activates public spaces in the region through artistic formats of exchange, participation, and co-production – often in collaboration with local actors. Over the course of three years, it will travel through all 53 cities in the Ruhr region. The project addresses important questions of social coexistence in an experimental and innovative way: Who owns public space and how can we create places for communal activities or activate existing spaces? What role does art play in this? The Grand Snail Tour aims to leave a variety of impressions, offer shared experiences and invite people to join the journey.

Am 31. März findet im LUX Pavillon der Hochschule Mainz die ganztägige, vierte Ausgabe der readOn Konferenz unter dem Titel AT THE EDGE OF KNOWING statt.

Die Konferenz richtet den Blick auf jene Momente, in denen Wissen brüchig wird – wenn sich zwischen Gewissheit und Vermutung, Erkenntnis und Ahnung ein offener Raum auftut. Ein Raum, der sich eindeutigen Definitionen entzieht: Fragen werden wichtiger als Antworten, Prozesse bedeutsamer als Ergebnisse – und Unsicherheit erscheint nicht als Mangel, sondern als produktive Kraft.

AT THE EDGE OF KNOWING lädt dazu ein, diese Schwelle des Verstehens bewusst zu betreten. Gemeinsam suchen wir nach neuen Perspektiven auf Gestaltung, Begegnung und das Denken möglicher Zukünfte. Nicht-Wissen wird dabei nicht umgangen, sondern als Ausgangspunkt ernst genommen.

In Vorträgen und Diskussionen untersuchen geladene Gäste, welche Rolle Unsicherheit in gestalterischen Prozessen, in der Forschung und in unserer Haltung zur Zukunft spielen kann. Die Konferenz versteht sich nicht als abgeschlossener Zustand, sondern als Reflexion eines Prozesses, der sich in die Ungewissheit hinein entfaltet – und lädt dazu ein, gemeinsam an den Rand des Wissens zu treten und die Weite des Unscharfen zu erkunden. In ungewissen Zeiten möchten wir Raum schaffen, um zusammenzukommen – und statt am scheinbar Sicheren festzuhalten, bewusst loszulassen und neu zu denken. Die Teilnahme ist gegen eine freiwillige Spende möglich.

Organisiert von den Studierenden des Masterstudiengangs Kommunikationsdesign der Hochschule Mainz.

Well informed. Badly disposed.
Doomscrolling, Negativbias und die sozialen Herausforderungen

Ort EIGENHEIM Weimar, Asbachstraße 1, 99423 Weimar / Eröffnung 14.03.2026 um 19 Uhr mit dem DJ Set Druck – Resonanz – Kontrollverlust von Christoph Höfferl / Dauer 15.03.2025 – 25.04.2026

beteiligte Künstler*innen: Anna Bittersohl, Aram Bartholl, Simon Baumgart, Jonas Blume, Benedikt Braun, Elisa Jule Braun, Paolo Cirio, Ben Grosser, Esra Gülmen, Susanne Junker, Philipp Kummer, Marc Lee, Kayla Mattes, Signe Pierce, Theresa Rothe, Michal Schmidt, Stefan Schiek

Der Auftakt des Jahresprogramms, das sich Zuversicht, Positivität und kollektiver Lebensfreude widmet, wird durch die Ausstellung „Well informed. Badly disposed.“ markiert. Zugleich versteht sich diese erste Ausstellung als bewusste Problemanalyse: Sie benennt die Bedingungen, unter denen ein positives Jahresthema heute nicht naiv, sondern notwendig erscheint – als Haltung, um zunehmender Polarisierung, Emotionalisierung und politischer Vereinnahmung von Information etwas entgegenzusetzen.

Im Zentrum stehen die Mechanismen von Doomscrolling und Negativbias – Phänomene, die unsere Wahrnehmung, unsere Stimmung und zunehmend auch den gesellschaftlichen Diskurs prägen. Eine immersive, düster-dystopische Ausstellungskulisse definiert einen bewusst abstoßenden Raum und schafft einen von Reizüberflutung geprägten Erfahrungsrahmen, der Angst, Erschöpfung, Ekel und Abgründigkeit vermittelt. Die Ausstellung macht jene emotionale Überforderung erfahrbar, die aus der permanenten Konfrontation mit negativen Nachrichten entsteht.

Künstlerische Positionen untersuchen, wie digitale Informationsflüsse, soziale Medien und algorithmische Logiken unser Denken und Fühlen beeinflussen. Dabei wird deutlich: Plattformen sind nicht neutral. Sie spiegeln ökonomische und politische Machtverhältnisse wider, verstärken Polarisierungen und prägen demokratische Öffentlichkeiten weltweit. Zugleich zeigt sich, dass individuelle Mediennutzung eng mit Fragen von Verantwortung, Vertrauen und Bildung verknüpft ist. Die Ausstellung macht sichtbar, wie stark wir dazu neigen, das Negative stärker zu gewichten als das Positive – und wie soziale Medien und Informationsplattformen diesen Bias gezielt nutzen, um Aufmerksamkeit zu maximieren.

„Well informed. Badly disposed.“ beleuchtet bewusst die negativen Einflüsse unserer medialen Umwelt und macht zugleich neugierig auf die weiteren Ausstellungen des Jahresthemas. Sie eröffnet den notwendigen Kontrast, um die Kraft der Zuversicht in den folgenden Projekten umso stärker erfahrbar werden zu lassen. So bildet diese erste Ausstellung den kritischen Auftakt für ein Programm, das Schritt für Schritt Perspektiven auf Optimismus, Empathie und kollektive Freude entfaltet.

By occupying nearly a third of our waking hours, screens are profoundly reshaping the contours of our relationships with others. In response, numerous journalistic and academic discourses echo concerns about the digital migration of our social lives: the idea frequently arises that the socio-technical systems at work in this migration are making us more resistant to diversity.

Our intention is to nuance this concern by acknowledging a foundational aspect of the internet—its original design to facilitate the virtuous and unprecedented emergence of communities of specific interests, often far more specialized than what our traditional offline social circles can accommodate. This utopia inevitably carries a tension between, on the one hand, the benefits of more efficient and far-reaching sociability, and on the other, the widely discussed risks of a social life limited to alters who are most similar to ourselves.

Curated by Aurélie Clémente-Ruiz, director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and Camille Roth, a researcher at CNRS in social sciences.

With: Nicolas Bailleul, Aram Bartholl, Léa Belloousovitch, Neïl Beloufa, Sophie Calle, Paola Ciarska, Laurent Grasso, Juliette Green, Ben Grosser, Özgür Kar, Béatrice Lartigue, Lauren Lee MacCarthy, Katherine Longly, Randa Maroufi, Magalie Mobetie, Martine Neddam, Philippe Parreno, Françoise Pétrovitch, Valentina Peri, Marilou Poncin, Jeanne Suspuglas

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🤳🏾Bring Your Phone! : TOUCH FARM 🌾👩‍🌾 reclaims the idea of the farm for the screen age. If farming once organized land, labor, and life, today it organizes attention and clout. TOUCH FARM takes the architecture of click farms and flips it from extraction to participation.

Bring your phone. Exhibit your work. Everyone participates.
🐷🐐🐰🐖🐴🐑🐓🐖🐔🐮🐇🌾🚜👩‍🌾
Curated by @arambartholl & @socratesstamatatos.

🎉 #Vorspiel 2026 Opening Party at @panke.gallery

📍panke.gallery, Friday, 16 January 2026 at 7 PM (Gerichtstr. 23, Hof 5, 13347 Berlin)

A look at how our online practices leave a trace and shape our rights. Drawing on the Charter of Digital Rights (2021), the exhibition explores seven key areas with humour and everyday examples. Framed within the Observatory of Digital Rights and curated by Fundación Telefónica and Domestic Data Streamers, the show encourages reflection and debate around the safe, responsible, critical, and creative use of technology.

We accept cookies as if they were freshly baked biscuits, without having the slightest idea of what ingredients they contain. We share photos of our children’s birthdays or family trips as if they were WhatsApp stickers, without knowing where they might end up. We use the same password for our bank account and our grocery app (spoiler: not a good idea). We check a website to see if it’s going to rain, only to give away our data like candy on Halloween.

The exhibition Today Is a Good Day to Discuss Digital Rights seeks to raise awareness about the rights and duties that citizens exercise and develop in the digital sphere. Moreover, the show invites us to keep debating and building a system of guarantees around the digital ecosystem — a kind of ethical guide that helps us understand what digital rights and duties are, what they imply, and the opportunities the technological environment offers citizens.

Framed within the initiative of the Observatory of Digital Rights and curated by Fundación Telefónicatogether with the artistic collective Domestic Data Streamers — which presents six installations —, the exhibition features works by contemporary artists such as United Visual Artists, Eva & Franco Mattes, Paolo Cirio, Noemí Iglesias Barrios, Theresa Reiwer, Hasan Elahi, and Aram Bartholl, among others. Their works challenge visitors, help them understand, and encourage reflection on our actions as digital beings. A much-needed exhibition, it fuels the debate around digital rights and duties, and calls for a safe, responsible, critical, and creative use of technology. Because today is a good day to discuss Digital Rights.

GOGBOT 2025
SCROLL PANIC REPEAT
18-21 september @ ENSCHEDE
festival for art music technology

Join us live-in-studio with season two of the Radio Spaetkauf x Europäische Akademie Berlin podcast collaboration. This year we focus on CULTURE. Each episode features fresh voices and perspectives representing a wide array of backgrounds, expertise and disciplines. Host Daniel Stern is joined by researchers, academics, independent artists, journalists and community leaders with unique insights into our evolving cultural interactions.

September 13th: Museums are more than just buildings that house objects. They are sites of memory, meaning, and power – spaces where stories are told, preserved, and sometimes contested. But who decides what’s worth keeping? And how do museums evolve in response to the cultures and technologies of their time?

As boundaries blur between archive and activism, exhibition and experience, we ask: What is a museum today? And what should it be? Together we explore the shifting roles of museums in shaping public understanding, identity, and imagination.

Guests include:

Michael Soltau – Synthesizer Museum Berlin
Aram Bartholl – Media and concept artist
Lilja-Ruben Vowe – PhD in cultural history, curator and inclusive mediator
Dr. Wenke Wegner – Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation

Host: Dan Stern

The festival brings artistic short films into public space – presented in a mobile, seemingly improvised exhibition object: a transport cart with pneumatic tires, stacked with various boxes, crates and bags, all secured with colorful tension straps. Through peepholes in these containers, passersby can watch the films on hidden tablets or smartphones. The route leads through five locations in the district (Goslaer Platz, Mierendorffplatz, Österreichpark, Schustehruspark, Lietzenseepark). At each stop, the “mini-museum” stays for about one hour. The project is accompanied throughout the day by the two artists and curators Marian Luft and Moritz Frei, who will be present to assist and engage with the audience.

Curated by Marian Luft & Moritz Frei

With:
Iván Argote, Sophia Süßmilch, Björn Melhus, Hansol Kim, Barış Çavuşoğlu, Lorna Mills, Andrew Birk, Peng Li

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This exhibition brings together models by artists whose works have been realized in public spaces across the world. These small-scale forms are not mere sketches; they were once proposals, prototypes, and poetic blueprints — early traces now translated into permanent works in the city.

with: Yasmin Alt, Aram Barthol, Jessica Buhlman, Moritz Frei, Gfeller Hellsgard, Andrea Pichl, Alona Rodeh, Andrea Zaumseil, Joshua Zielinski

curated by: Jay Gard

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English, ‘material’ is both a thing and a quality. The exhibition at RAUM SCHROTH presents international works and artistic concepts that focus on the material itself and explore its elementary nature, characteristics and behaviour.

These reflections include, in particular, possibilities of the material that run counter to customary uses, as well as surprising properties that the material does not usually display. The basic material is extremely diverse, ranging from solid substances that are also used to produce goods, to vegetable and ephemeral elements – the reference to the surrounding space, to change and transience is inextricably linked to the concept of material.

This opens up the broad field of meanings that are gained in the artistic transformation of the material and which in turn interweave it with existential, everyday and social experiences and concepts. material messenger is curated by Elisabeth Sonneck and Juliane Rogge. The exhibition includes works from the Schroth Collection and from invited artists:

Julieta Aranda | Aram Bartholl | Burghard | Angela de la Cruz | Spencer Finch | Abie Franklin & Daniel Hölzl | Jason Gringler | Carla Guagliardi | Vanessa Henn | Iepe | Zhanna Kadyrova | Katja Kottmann | Linda Lach | Jamie North | Anton Quiring | Ulrich Rückriem | Maarit Salolainen | Karin Sander | Nora Schattauer | David Semper | Berndnaut Smilde | Elisabeth Sonneck | Ignacio Uriarte | Christoph Weber | Beat Zoderer

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Chronically Online – imagining an internet utopia

Chronically Online is a virtual residency for emerging artists who are deeply immersed in the digital world and explore themes related to the internet and social media. Participants will develop a concept into a presentable state or further develop an existing artwork for it to be exhibited at NPAK in Yerevan, Armenia.

Concept, realization and curation by Kimia Ghetmiri
Realization and curation by Namor Votilav
Institutional organizer: NPAK
Supported by HK-Art Gallery and Verein zur Förderung des Instituts für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte e.V.

Participating artists: Aram Bartholl, Zach Blas, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Charles & Ray Eames, Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner, Timo Nasseri, Norbert Pape & Simon Speiser, Trevor Paglen, Katie Paterson, Marie Pietsch, Agnieszka Polska, Jana Schumacher, Hoda Tawakol.

How do we navigate a world in which our actions have a planetary impact? In our post-global era, we cannot see ourselves merely as inhabitants of the Earth. Essentially, we are geological actors whose economic, ecological and political decisions leave profound marks on the globe. From this perspective, the Earth can be viewed as a dynamic system within a much larger cosmic structure.

The group exhibition Between Stars and Signals at the Kunsthaus Hamburg focuses on the bigger picture and spans an arc from humanity’s early understanding of the world and its orientation on the stars all the way to the planetary paradigm and modern technologies such as GPS. The participating artists have engaged in the topic of physical movement through space and time along with its philosophical and social implication. The works on view, spanning video, wall and spatial installations, reflect complex relationships between humans, nature and the cosmos – and make us think. For the question remains whether the digital transformation will lead to a deeper cosmic consciousness or whether it will distance us even further from our immediate experience of the world.

From the Cosmos to the Commons marks the beginning of the five-year programme conceived by City Curator Joanna Warsza. In 2025, it includes exhibitions at the Planetarium Hamburg, Stadtpark, the Kunsthaus Hamburg and a symposium at the Warburg Haus. Since 2024, the project City Curator Hamburg has been hosted by Kunsthaus Hamburg.

Curated by Anna Nowak

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