Exhibitions

CAPSIZE CHRONICLES

Art, Science, and the Oceanic World
Rachel Mayeri

27 September - 19 October 2025

Art Laboratory Berlin invites the audience to meet Los Angeles based artist Rachel Mayeri and her newest artwork R/P FLIP R.I.P., with its European premiere in this solo exhibition. Join us for the Berlin opening on Fri, 26 September at 8 pm (the artist is present). It is an experimental new video work about the R/P FLIP, which stands for Research Platform FLoating Instrument Platform (1962-2023), the world-famous nautical rarity that flips 90 degrees to become a live-in buoy for studying the ocean. The FLIP was designed for stability to study acoustics in a turbulent ocean, yet ironically the interior is fluid, built for living both in horizontal and vertical orientations. In the artwork, performers activate the FLIP’s architecture as a playground for disorientation: floors become walls, and doors become holes. Intercut with military and oceanographic films, the FLIP film becomes a platform for conceptual flips: landlubbers encountering the alien world of the ocean, and of oceanography’s shift from militarism to ecology. Commissioned for the Getty-sponsored Southern California landmark show PST Art: Art & Science Collide, created by artist Rachel Mayeri, R/P FLIP R.I P. is currently presented as a three-channel video installation at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, California. Read more

FERMENTING TEXTILES

Weaving Together Traditional Craft, Anthropology, Microbiology, and Art
Adama Séré, Laurence Douny, Regine Hengge, Pauline Agustoni, Satomi Minoshima

16 May - 6 July 2025

Fermenting Textiles is a unique trans-disciplinary research and exhibition project that puts active matter at the center: it connects anthropology, microbiology, and art through the engagement of artisans, anthropologists, scientists, and artists, as well as more-than-human actors. Fermenting Textiles explores the fermentation of textile in mud and plant material to produce complex dyeing for various use – from traditional hunter shirts in Burkina Faso to kimono silk dyeing in Japan. In each case the process is artisanal and has fascinating traditional uses and meanings. Both cases make use of natural chemical and biological processes to create unique aesthetic and medicinal results. Read more

Queer Sonic Fingerprint

Transdisciplinary Research
Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz

20 October - 1 December 2024

hands with blue gloves steadying a teapot with a sound device attached

Adam and Isabel in an archive recording sound sent from a small speaker through a basket into a microphone

How do bodies sound? And how can a group of cultural belongings in an ethnological museum collection resonate in unexpected queer kin relations? In their interactive multichannel sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint, sound artist Adam Pultz and anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker speculatively imagines non-normative relations around cultural belongings in ethnological museums and beyond. The installation amplifies the collection‘s materiality through sonic fingerprints—that is—the reflections of a body’s unique acoustic characteristics. In a transdisciplinary encounter with sound processing and evolutionary computing, dynamically changing fingerprints bring selected parts of museum collections to life in a multichannel sonic ecology. Read more

Colour Topographies

Artistic Research
Käthe Wenzel

31 August - 6 October 2024

Site-specific colours combine colour and location, as a type of topographical perception through local colour. What colour producing plants and minerals can be found in this place, and how can they be perceived and understood through colour? Plant knowledge is knowledge of place. This project explores topics of plant blindness, urban ecology, mapping, bio-invasiveness and migration as well as Zero Waste, Queer Ecologies and Interspecies Cooperation. Read more

Archive

Mind the Fungi

Local Tree Mushrooms as Sustainable Material for the Future

5 September 2019 - 30 April 2020

Mind the Fungi is a collaboration between the TU Berlin Institute for Biotechnology and Art Laboratory Berlin, combining scientific research, citizen science and artist and designer residencies-in-lab. The exhibition shows produced biomaterials with different shapes, structures and qualities.

The Silkworm Project

Vivian Xu

1 June - 14 July 2019

The artist explores silkworms to design hybrid machines capable of producing self-organised 2D and 3D silk structures. Xu developed cybernetic devices based on both biological and computer-controlled logic to understand how far the behaviour of insects can serve as a foundation for technological design.

Watery Ecologies. Artistic Research

Kat Austen | Mary Maggic | Fara Peluso

20 January - 17 March 2019

The exhibition presents art projects on water, life and chemical disruption. Based on research in biology, chemistry and ethnography with distinct and radical DIY methods, they explore the threat of human impact on both the environment and our own bodies.

Strange Encounters with Vegetal Others

Špela Petrič

22 September - 25 November 2018

The epistemological approaches of hybrid art and biochemistry inform the work of artist Špela Petrič with the Plant Kingdom as part of a multi-species collaboration. She explores the ontologies, methodologies, ethics and practices of care involved in our relationship to the vegetal.

Viscous Bodies

Sarah Hermanutz | Alanna Lynch

24 March - 13 May 2018

Taking all things fluid as a starting point, the work of artists Sarah Hermanutz and Alanna Lynch covers themes such as amphibians, bodily borders, boundaries, marginalisation, materialism, seepage, sensory and wetlands through performance, installations, multimedia and living artworks.

Nonhuman Agents

Nonhuman Networks
Heather Barnett | Saša Spačal, Mirjan Švagelj & Anil Podgornik

30 September - 26 November 2017

How does the world’s largest single celled creature function as a computer? Can we tap into the so-called ‘Internet of trees’? Performative works act as enablers for the audience to engage in non-linguistic forms of awareness and contact with several deceptively simple life forms.

Nonhuman Subjectivities

Under-Mine
Alinta Krauth

26 February - 2 April 2017

The exhibition project investigates possibilities of communicating nonhuman perception through the interface of artistic practice and new technologies. By using time-based techniques artist Alinta Krauth considers potential narratives of animals under threat from climate change.

Nonhuman Subjectivities

Aural Aquatic Presence
Robertina Šebjanič

3 September - 9 October 2016

The exhibition offers a dialogue of agency and sentience in one of the ‘simplest’ of multicellular creatures: the jellyfish related to a human made machine. Another project discusses sound in marine systems, as well as the effects of human intervention on aural aquatic systems.

Nature Cultures

at the Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung
Brandon Ballengée | Katya Gardea Browne | Pinar Yoldas

2 July - 11 September 2016

The exhibition explores the interwoven fabric of both the human and nonhuman in the 21st century. The side effects of human technology intrude into every environment, altering the balance, and even the make up of what we once called nature. While ecological disaster…

Nonhuman Subjectivities

On Animals. Cognition, Senses, Play
Rachel Mayeri | Maja Smrekar

28 May - 17 July 2016

The art projects discuss primates and the wolf-dog-human continuum: The instinct and the senses of the nonhuman are placed at the centre of artistic research, while aiming to translate the nonhuman cognitive ability by means of the performance, film and art science collaboration.

Nonhuman Subjectivities

The Other Selves. On the Phenomenon of the Microbiome
François-Joseph Lapointe | Saša Spačal with Mirjan Švagelj & Anil Podgornik | Tarsh Bates | Joana Ricou

27 February - 30 April 2016

Various artistic projects discuss the complex microbial environment found on and within the human body as performance, living installation or image. The phenomenon of the microbiome brings forth many complex questions about human identity and our relation to our multiple selves.

PROSTHESES

Transhuman Life Forms
Susanna Hertrich

26 September - 29 November 2015

The works of Susanna Hertrich reflect the phenomenon of prostheses as an extension of the human in the 21st century. In the context of the latest technologies and current developments in the field of neuroscience and biology, they presents new transhuman sensory extensions

Growing Geometries

Evolving Forms
Theresa Schubert

29 August - 20 September 2015

The artist Theresa Schubert conducts research at the intersection of art, biology, and technology. Her artistic practice combines various media such as audiovisual installations, photography or work on paper which deals with the phenomena of nature not only as a source of inspiration, but as a material and critical process…

bOdy pandemOnium

Immersion into Noise
Joseph Nechvatal

25 April - 21 June 2015

Joseph Nechvatal is a post-conceptual artist working in digital art. He is one of the most important pioneers of new media art, but at the same time makes use of ‘old media’ (painting and drawing) created through a use of custom artificial life software and computer robotics.

[micro]biologies II

πρωτεο / proteo
Joanna Hoffmann

24 January - 29 March 2015

Joanna Hoffmann’s transdisciplinary works combine art, microbiology, physics and technology. Her use of multimedia installations, 3d stereoscopy, experimental video animation and other media explore the visualization of sub-atomic and molecular as well as cosmic space.