Events

Get-together with Printed Matter

Books and printed matter for sale, some farewells and updates about the program of 2025 and 2026

15 December 2024, 4 - 9 pm

Join us for a Get-together with warm drinks and snacks with some books and printed matter for sale. Let’s come together before the seasonal break and meet on-site at Art Laboratory Berlin for some farewells and some new announcements for the coming year. In our current challenging times, we consider it very meaningful to meet in person, support one another, and express the value of art and culture production. Come and join us with friends and colleagues – we would appreciate it a lot! Read more

Event | Panel Discussion

ZOOM IN!

CURRENT COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN ART, BIOLOGY, MUSIC, AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Panel Discussion | With Isabel Bredenbröker, Adam Pultz, India Mansour, and Sybille Neumeyer

@Berlin Science Week, Holzmarkt 25! 8 November 2024, 5:30 - 7:00 pm

Join us for an invited panel discussion at BERLIN SCIENCE WEEK at Holzmarkt 25 (Berlin Mitte): How do bodies sound? How can we visualize strategies for accessing environmental data from closed systems called biospheres? And how can a group of cultural belongings in an ethnological museum collection resonate in unexpected queer kin relations? Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to a diverse panel with cutting edge transdisciplinary research projects on current research topics: From postcolonialism over to postanthropocentrism, they nurture their knowledge production by transgressing discipline borders with a radical openness for nonhuman subjectivities. Read more

Event | Reading Club

Inspired by…

Reading Club
With Guest Artists Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz

5 November 2024

Event | Colloquium

IN-PROGRESS… | COLLOQUIUM

Research in Art, Science and Humanities
With Ionat Zurr

15 October 2024, 8 pm CET (on-site + online)

close up of a sculpture, circles with metal mesh, yellowish cat to the photograph

Trees photographed from below with a green-yellow cast to the photograph

The Colloquium (on 15 Oct it will be hybrid – both on-site and online) addresses an international interdisciplinary research audience to present and discuss past, present or future projects by artists and scholars, curators or editors from the fields of art, science and the humanities. The topics could refer to an art project, a book, text or chapter, a research or exhibition project, a lab experiment, a lecture series, a conference concept or other. The presentations and exchange will focus on the work-in-progress. Methodological approaches – theoretical or practical – are also of great interest here. While researching, we often tend to shift between practical inquiry and theoretical research, browsing various disciplines. Following the original meaning of colloquium as “speaking together”, we want to provide a platform for exchange and embrace various kinds of work processes which are often not seen or talked about. Read more

Event | Walk & Talk

WALK & TALK

Berries, berries, berries and rosehips. FERAL FIELDWORK back at Nasse Dreieck (Autumn Edition) | Artist Talk by Käthe Wenzel

6 October 2024, Walk (1 pm) and Talk (3 pm)

Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to a double event – a walk with the interdisciplinary research group FERAL FIELDWORK (1 – 2 pm) and an artist talk with Käthe Wenzel (3 – 4 pm). Both projects have emerged from the MATTER OF FLUX network and festival in 2023.Under the moniker “Feral Fieldwork”, Alice Cannavà, Chiara Garbellotto, and Sina Ribak invite to a walk at Nasses Dreieck communicating the dense botanical, socio-political, and toxic histories of the Stadtbrache, its life forms and their materialised traces, also involving storytelling, multispecies embodiment, and mapping, they will also share methodological reflections on how to work with multiple sensibilities and knowledges. At the last day of her exhibition “Colour Topographies”, Käthe Wenzel will reflect the artistic processes of urban foraging and ink extraction and the possibilities of natural inks and will give a short foray into urban biocolorants, techniques of inkmaking, and material cultures of colour(s). Read more

Event | Reading Club

Inspired by…

Reading Club
With Guest Artist Aslı Dinç

1 October 2024

Inspired by… is an event series, a hybrid format derived from reading group and artist talk formats. In each session, an invited artist will choose a specific text or excerpt from a book that was inspirational for the artist’s practice and/or a particular project that the artist will introduce. Guest Artists on 1 October 2024 Aslı Dinç On 1 October 2024, Inspired by… welcomes Aslı Dinç. Inspired by cyberfeminism and tech-capitalism, she crafts playgrounds using speculative and dystopian narratives as tools for resistance. Her approach involves simulating and shape-shifting to explore and question existing structures and systems. In this session of Inspired by… Aslı selected Future Mutation: Technology, Shanzai and the Evolution of Species by Anna Greenspan and Suzanne Livingston for a collective reading to refer to Aslı’s artistic research and practice. This book delves into cybernetics and emerging technologies in the rapidly changing landscape of Shenzhen, China, while drawing parallels between technological mutations and evolutionary biology. Read more

Event | Workshop

Hidden Colours

Inkmaking with Plants in Urban Space
Käthe Wenzel

13 - 14 July 2024

empty urban lot with grass, trees, rubble. In the background a mural of a little girl on the firewall of an apartment building

crushed stones and earth, pigment and a try with water

Workshop on urban ink and dye extraction from plants, soil and waste. 90% of modern paints are made from petrochemical products. Until the 20th century, the local and more environmentally friendly production of natural paints was commonplace as a technology both in the studio and in the home. Even today, inks and paints can be made from materials collected in urban areas. The workshop covers topics ranging from plant blindness, urban ecology, bio-invasiveness and migration to zero waste, queer ecologies and interspecies cooperation, and will focus on collecting, foraging rules, color extraction, modification and conservation. Read more

Event | Residency

Sending Occulto 8 to Print

A Temporary Editorial Office as Performance, Organic Exhibition, and Non-systematic Archive
Editorial Residency with Alice Cannavà

10 May - 7 July 2024

Occulto’s publisher Alice Cannavà will be in residence at Art Laboratory Berlin from 10 May until 7 July 2024, editing and designing the upcoming issue Occulto 8: Photographic, to be released in July. The temporary editorial office at ALB offers the opportunity to open up and make visible the work behind the birth of a magazine, uncovering its performative potential and the richness of its byproducts and side-effects. Occulto 8: Photographic focuses on photography from an artistic, historical, technoscientific, and ethical perspective, building on and playing with the transdisciplinary and cross-genre approach developed by Occulto over the years. As usual, the issue will combine richly illustrated essays with visual artists’ projects and experimental sound. The public is invited to visit the temporary editorial office on 31 May and on 28 June between 5 and 9 pm, as part of the Kolonie Wedding monthly open-door Friday. An Open Occulto gathering for contributors, editors, readers, colleagues, old and new friends, and interested newcomers is planned for 2 July 2024 at 6 pm. Read more

Event | Workshop

Embodied Methods to explore chemical relationships

with Jemma Woolmore and Pati Masłowska

22 June 2024

Chemicals pervade our environment, they interact with and alter bodies, yet are often invisible. Chemicals are agents whose paths reveal connections across bodies – land, water, human and non-human. How can we engage with what is happening inside our bodies? How can we better understand these chemical relations? This is a workshop to share and develop ways of knowing our bodies and the chemicals inside them. Collectively we will explore embodied approaches using the senses, materials and movement to find different ways of knowing chemicals and their relationships with us. Read more

Event | Reading Club

Inspired by…

Reading Club
With Guest Artists ella hebendanz and pamela varela

18 June 2024

Inspired by… is an event series, a hybrid format derived from reading group and artist talk formats. In each session, an invited artist will choose a specific text or excerpt from a book that was inspirational for the artist’s practice and/or a particular project that the artist will introduce. Guest Artists on 18 June 2024 ella hebendanz (DE) and pamela varela (MX) On 18 June 2024, Inspired by… will welcome the artist duo ella hebendanz (DE) and pamela varela (MX) via zoom meeting. They initiated “re-c(O)unting”, which is an artistic-scientific research project, investigating the colonial history between Europe and Latin America and relating it to the colonial approach medicine has had on female-assigned bodies. It was born as an attempt to investigate the link between their roots and create decolonial lines of exchange. Read more

Archive

Event | Talk

Symbiosis in intra-flux of the Anthropocene

Project Presentation
Saša Spačal

29 November 2019

For the month of November 2019 bio media artist Saša Spačal undertook artistic research at the Rillig Group, Ecology of Plants, Institute of Biology, FU Berlin, addressing pressing societal and environmental issues such as climate crisis and plastic pollution.

Event | Walk & Talk

Mind the Fungi

Walk & Talks
Theresa Schubert and TU Berlin

Autumn 2018 and 2019

In the Walk & Talks artist Theresa Schubert and biotechnologists from TU Berlin explore with public groups the potential of sustainable biomaterials from fungi in the forests of Berlin and Brandenburg. After collecting tree fungi, the public is invited to the TUB lab to cultivate them.

Event | Course

Mind the Fungi

Mushroom Cultivation Courses | TOP Lab

Spring 2019 and Autumn 2019

TOP Lab will host a mushroom cultivation course where the participants will learn how to isolate and grow mushrooms for different purposes, such as packaging materials, furniture, building materials and even leather. The course will show how to set up a culture to grow edible mushrooms.

Event | Workshop

Local Area Network (LAN)

Part of the project: Invisible Forces
Martin Howse

13 October 2019

Local Area Network (LAN) open workshop is a collective, speculative investigation of local fields/particles, and energetic exchanges, towards the hacking and re-routing of energy flows and networks at all stacked levels of local geological, environmental and technological…

Event | Performance, Workshop

DIY Hack the Panke

Wasserpank | Workshop & Jam Session
Kat Austen and Nenad Popov

5 October 2019

Artist and chemist Kat Austen together with sound and new media artist Nenad Popov take the Panke river and its water as a starting point for this exciting workshop on sound experimentation from water and the environment, experimenting with hydrophone recordings.

Event | Performance

DIY Hack the Panke

Pankquelle
Sarah Hermanutz and Nenad Popov

5 October 2019

The artists perform a new work based on their involvement in the art science collective DIY Hack the Panke. The two artists’ previous collaboration have mixed Hermanutz’s artistic research into wetland ecologies with Popov’s sound and programming-based work.

Event | Walk & Talk

DIY Hack the Panke

Summer Walk & Talk #2
India Mansour | Nenad Popov | James Whitehead

22 September 2019

For the last day of summer, sound and new media artist Nenad Popov and biologists India Mansour and James Whitehead walk along the Panke and give a series of short talks interwoven with participatory inter/actions between visible and invisible ecological layers.

Event | Walk & Talk

DIY Hack the Panke

Summer Walk & Talk #1
Eliot Morrison and Daniel Lammel

13 July 2019

During the event we will discuss the interaction of water, soil and atmosphere from the molecular level and how this effects and is affected by organisms up to the larger ecological level and how water, plants and soil take part in cycles of carbon and nitrogen that support life.

Event | Conference

The Artist-Silkworm Interface

The Agricultural Treatise as Source and Scrutiny for Creating an Artist Book
Vivan Xu | Lisa Onaga | Dagmar Schäfer | Regine Rapp | Anna Grasskamp | Yubin Shen

4 July 2019

This one-day symposium discusses how the lens of contemporary art can engage with the genre of the agricultural treatises and manuals that have long attracted the attention of scholars in the history of science.

Event | Talk

Conversations in Silk

Artist and scholar talk
Vivian Xu and Lisa Onaga

30 June 2019

“Conversations in Silk” presents a dialogue between historian of biology Lisa Onaga and artist and designer Vivian Xu reflecting on the intermingled topics of silk, sericulture, and specultations of the future of the silkworm-human relations within a technoscience framework.

Event | Workshop

THE SILKWORM PROJECT Workshop

Vivian Xu

8 June 2019

The Silkworm Project Workshop gives insight into the artistic research and practice by Vivian Xu and offers a hands-on part, based on the artist’s at ALB of the same name. Participants were each given silkworms to take home and raise, hand-reared by the artist in Berlin.

Event | Workshop

DIY Hack the Panke

Panke Life. Microbiodiversity
Sarah Hermanutz | India Mansour | Fara Peluso

26 May 2019

The workshops invites to investigate artistically and scientifically microbial life and ecologies of an urban waterway. The workshop will explore the river Panke and floodplain as microbial habitats, with special emphasis on water, sediment and soil along the riverbanks.

Event | Workshop

DIY Hack the Panke

(Un)Real Ecologies. Microplastics
Kat Austen and Frithjof Glowinski

13 - 14 April 2019

How do organisms and microorganisms exist with microplastics? We will investigate water samples and will use DIY chemistry methods to separate microplastics from mineral and organic matter, and discover the origins of the plastics they find by creating density columns.

Event | Performance, Talk

HYDRO_PERFORMANCE NIGHT

PERFORMANCES, TALKS WITH NEW CASSETTES AND VINYLS!
Kat Austen, Robertina Šebjanič and Fara Peluso

16 March 2019

The Matter of the Soul | Symphony by Kat Austen is a performance work that engenders empathy with the consequences of climate change. Aquatocene / The subaquatic quest for serenity by Robertina Šebjanič investigates underwater noise pollution created by humankind in the oceans.

Event | Talk, Workshop

The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Natalia Fuchs and Helena Nikonole | Talk by Maurice Jones

13 - 15 March 2019

Within the framework of the CTM 2019 exhibition, two events focused on current notions of Artificial Intelligence in art and society will take place at and in collaboration with Art Laboratory Berlin.