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 | Workshop

Phytocracy in situ

Prototyping tools for the investigation of plant governance
Špela Petrič

22 September 2018

As part of the inquiries into Vegetal Otherness, Špela Petrič set out to produce her own phytocracy-revealing onto-epistemological tools that are inspired by actual institutions/domains/cultural practices framing plant-people relations…

Event | Performance, Talk, Workshop

Biosignals

Sound Art, Narrations and Nature-based Data Streams

24- 25 August 2018

BioSignals is a series of site-specific sound art, narrations and nature-based data streams by human and nonhuman cultural producers in connection with the 2019 Pixelache Festival..

Event | Performance, Talk

NOW. A Kinetic Life

Bidisha Das and Thomas Heidtmann

3 - 5 August 2018

is an interactive installation that spans a visual and acoustic connection between outer space and physical spaces that surround us. It is an orchestra of movement using elements from outer space, nature and human bodies as instrumentations.

Event | Workshop, Workshop

DIY Hack the Panke

(Un)Real Ecologies. Microplastics | Workshop
Kat Austen and Joana MacLean

6 - 8 July 2018

How do organisms and inhabitants of the Panke live with plastic in their habitat? In the 3-day workshop we search for visible interactions between plastics and biota in and around the Panke. We also use chemical protocol for the analysis of (micro)plastics in water samples.

Event | Book Release Party

Half Life. Machines/ Organisms

Artistic Positions in the context of Climate Change and Extinction
Book Release Party

6 July 2018

41 artistic positions from 15 countries provide critical and visionary views onto socio-emotional service machines – proxies and social crutches; Ersatz: Machine environments and artificial organisms; Utopia; Mediator machines and trans-species communication…

Event | Conference

Nonhuman Agents in art, culture and theory

Interdisciplinary Conference

24 - 26 November 2017

The conference takes into account recent philosophical approaches which question anthropocentrism. We will redefine intelligence (human, animal and plant intelligence), agency and sentience. Exhibiting artists as well as scholars from humanities and science will debate together.

Event | Talk

Nonhuman Agents

ill-at-ease seep
Sarah Hermanutz

28 October 2017

In her lecture the artist Sarah Hermanutz discussed the relationship between humans and wetlands, which is the focus in her long-term artistic research. Wetlands are one of the most biologically diverse and important ecosystems for life on earth, but within the past century..

Event | Workshop

Nonhuman Agents

Swarm | Cell | City
Heather Barnett + plan b (Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers)

23 - 24 September 2017

This workshop is a participatory experiment on art, performance and biology that precedes the exhibition Nonhuman Networks. The project invites the participants to view the city of Berlin by the nonhuman perspectives of the intelligent single-cell organism, the slime mould.

Event | Walk & Talk

Nonhuman Agents

The forestal psyche
Theresa Schubert

25 - 26 August 2017

This lecture and workshop are based on the artist’s long-term artistic research project on living organisms as an artistic material and medium. For this project, Schubert dedicates herself to the potential of slime moulds, mosses and lichens from the forests around Berlin.

Event | Performance, Talk, Workshop

Nonhuman Agents

Anatomy of an inter-connected system
Margherita Pevere

15 July 2017

Starting point is the artist’s research at the junction of visual arts, theoretical inquiry and investigation of biological processes, focusing on the discourses regarding human-nature relationship in the frame of today’s environmental crisis and how artistic practices…

Event | Performance, Talk, Workshop

Nonhuman Agents

Gut Feelings
Alanna Lynch

18 June 2017

Alanna Lynch has been growing the microorganisms that produce kombucha tea. Through the process of fermentation this symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeasts (SCOBY) produces a cellulose material that is slimy and smells strongly while wet and can be dried and used as a textile.

Event | Performance, Talk

Cellf

Technosphärenklänge #3
Guy Ben-Ary
Presse Feedback

12 - 13 May 2017

In the work cellF human neurons living in a Petri dish perform duets with human musicians: These are grown into a culture of 100,000 living neurons. Lined with electrodes, these neurons form output via an analog synthesizer, cellF, allowing them to “jam” with human musicians.

Event | Talk

Guy Ben-Ary

Artist Talk

5 May 2017

In his talk Guy Ben-Ary will present some of the methodologies and theories that underpin his artistic practice by using as examples, four of his major projects completed over the last decade: MEART, The Silent Barrage, In-Potentia, and CellF

Event | Talk, Workshop

DIYBio NOW

DIYBio faire
Biotinkering e.V.

17 - 19 February 2017

The three-day bio-fair brings together the players in the Berlin biohacking scene for a series of hands-on workshops, talks and a special exhibition featuring unique DIY laboratory equipment.

Event | Talk

SciArt Café

with BIOMOD and iGEM Team Berlin

29 January 2017

The iGEM Berlin team (http://igem.berlin/) presents their fifth SciArt Café. Under the main theme of “Synthetic Biology – a toolkit for solving humanity’s problems” we will hear scientists and artists working with bioscience and afterwards discuss topics of synthetic biology.