Opening 12.06.2026, 7:00 pm
Leopold-Hoesch-Museum – Düren, Germany
Performing Landscapes articulates an understanding of landscape as shaped by labour, resource extraction and social transformation. The exhibition explores how landscapes are places where geology, political history, and memory become inseparable. To follow coal, sandstone, marble, or uranium is to move across histories that overlap in contradictory ways, and that cannot separate the industrial and the ecological.
Artworks, interventions, and archival research open up the complex relation between resource extraction and human and non-human life. The works span from the Hambach open-cast mine—the largest artificial excavation in Europe—to the moorlands of Northern Germany, the former sites of the Wismut uranium mining company, and to Colombian and British coal mines. The project builds on the LHM’s ongoing engagement with industrial landscapes, which began with On Life in Industrial Landscapes—A Photographic Inventory (2019) and continued with On Life in Industrial Landscapes—The Structural Change in View (2021). With Performing Landscapes the LHM turns to the social, historical, and political processes that shape industrial landscapes—to the conflicts, archival gaps, acts of resistance, and lived experiences that lie within and beyond the visible landscape.
This exhibition mixes artworks with research, as well as spatial and scenographic interventions, and it was imagined and developed with students from the Scenography and Exhibition Design department at HfG Karlsruhe. The works and research of Helena Bänsch, Franka Karola Breunig, Peter Oellerich, Ruby Richter, Lilith Stumpf, and Laura Waterstradt are in dialogue with selected works from the LHM collection, archival materials, and contributions by Mareike Bernien & Alex Gerbaulet, Alex Grein, Laura Haak, Susanne Kriemann, Camilo Pachón & Sara Alvarado, Elizabeth Price, and Silke Schatz.
Artists
Mareike Bernien & Alex Gerbaulet, Alex Grein, Laura Haak, Susanne Kriemann, Camilo Pachón & Sara Alvarado, Elizabeth Price, and Silke Schatz
Curators
Lisa Oord and Hanne König