Artotale

What happens when art moves beyond the gallery and into the spaces where we study, work, and live? During Opening Week, ARTotale Re:New brings artists, students, and the wider community together for a series of installations, performances, and participatory interventions across the Leuphana campus and the city of Lüneburg.

ARTotale Re:New picks up where ARTotale 2009 left off, and critically engages with public space on campus where study and learning takes place outside of the seminar room or lecture hall. Different artistic positions attend to the materiality and performativity of artistic practices and to historical and contemporary struggles.

From October 4–7, five artists will develop and create new works on site, exploring themes of public space, collective experience, identity, history, and the relationship between structure and unpredictability.

• Bettina Mileta

Bettina Mileta’s temporary textile installation explores the potential of fabric beyond the private and domestic spheres. The work brings together vibrant textile banners whose colors, textures, and movement interact with the architectural environment, creating a dialogue between the softness and fluidity of textiles and the geometric structures of the university campus.

Mileta approaches textiles as a material for public encounters, a perspective she describes through the concept of “public materiality.” Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses collaborative stage projects, urban interventions, exhibitions in outdoor environments, and artistic research along the Elbe River. She lives and works in Berlin and studied art, art education, and fashion design in Berlin and Basel.

Website: bettinamileta.com

• Suyoung Kim

Suyoung Kim’s Reactive Layers examines the relationship between human-made order and the unpredictable forces of everyday life. The installation begins with the square, a geometric form associated with structure, rules, and standardized systems. Applied directly to the ground in layers of pastel chalk, the squares gradually change through pedestrian movement, environmental conditions, and collective use.

The work is renewed daily in changing colors. As surfaces wear away and are restored, layers of time accumulate, tracing the activities and movements of campus life. What begins as a precise geometric structure becomes an evolving, living archive shaped by the people and environment around it.

Suyoung Kim is an interdisciplinary artist based in Cologne. She studied fine art in Gyeongsan, South Korea, and Saarbrücken, Germany. Her practice explores the transformation of materials, spaces, and systems through processes of interaction and change.

Website: suyoung-kim.com

• Wouter Osterholt

Wouter Osterholt’s project engages with the history of the Leuphana campus, formerly the site of the Scharnhorst military barracks, and with contemporary discussions surrounding militarization in Germany. Through a collaborative installation developed with students, the work asks how we imagine our futures and what it means to be placed in a different social role.

Life-size cardboard figures, created together with students during Opening Week, form a grid-like installation. The work creates a space for reflection on the relationship between the university’s military past, contemporary social conditions, and the uncertainties surrounding the future. Students are invited to participate in the making of the work and to consider how personal experiences intersect with broader historical and political developments.

Osterholt is a conceptual artist based in Berlin who works in public space and exhibition contexts. His practice develops strategic interventions in places where social, political, and ecological tensions become visible. Through research-based and participatory projects, he explores local political landscapes, overlooked histories, and alternative narratives.

Website: wouterosterholt.com

• Jakob-Margrit Wirth

Jakob-Margrit Wirth’s performative intervention explores how gender, identity, and access manifest themselves physically and symbolically in public space. Moving between the university campus and the city of Lüneburg, the project considers how bodies are perceived, positioned, and experienced within shared environments.

The work begins from Wirth’s own experience as a non-binary artist and examines how access, safety, privilege, and social expectations shape experiences of public space. Through performance and intervention, Wirth invites audiences to reflect on the ways that public environments are experienced differently by different bodies.

Wirth is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice combines performance, social engagement, and research. With a background in social sciences and fine art, Wirth approaches artistic work as a form of knowledge production grounded in lived experience and public encounter. Their projects engage audiences in developing forms of social and political imagination beyond dominant structures.

Website: jakobwirth.net

• Swoon (Caledonia Curry)

The work of renowned American artist Caledonia Curry, known as Swoon, will return to Lüneburg with a wheat-paste installation on campus. Working with paper and a traditional mixture of wheat starch and water, the project brings Swoon’s distinctive approach to portraiture, storytelling, and public space into dialogue with the university environment.

Swoon participated in ARTotale in 2009 and unfortunately, her work from that period in the city center no longer exists, making a return to Lüneburg an opportunity to reconnect with the city’s artistic history. The installation also creates a space for students to engage directly with the processes of public art production and installation.

Swoon is an American artist whose practice encompasses large-scale paper installations, printmaking, community-based projects, and public art. Her work often explores human connection, collective memory, and the relationship between individual stories and the environments in which they unfold.

Website: swoonstudio.org

• Mariana Yampolsky: Seeing Mexico

Alongside the commissioned artworks, Mariana Yampolsky: Seeing Mexico presents four photographs by the celebrated Mexican photographer Mariana Yampolsky (1925–2002). Curated by Veronica Bremer with the support and permission from the Centro de la Imagen, Secretaría de Cultura, Mexico, the outdoor companion exhibition forms a dialogue between photographic documentation, public art, and contemporary artistic practices.

Yampolsky’s photographs offer encounters with Mexican visual culture and street art, extending ARTotale Re:New’s engagement with public space, cultural memory, and the ways images shape our understanding of everyday environments. The exhibition is planned to remain on display from October 2026 until approximately February 2027, allowing the photographs to unfold through repeated encounters over time.

Yampolsky was a highly regarded photographer whose work documented the people, architecture, material culture, and everyday life of Mexico. Her photographic archive was inscribed in the Registro del Programa Memoria del Mundo de México de la UNESCO in 2021, recognizing its documentary and cultural significance.

The project was initiated by Dr. Veronica Bremer, Research Associate and Lecturer at Studium Individuale, and Prof. Dr. Jordan Troeller, Junior Professor of Contemporary Art History and Aesthetic Practices, and is supported by Steph Joyce, Research Assistant, Arndis Algea Oeynhausen, Student Assistant, and Till Lange, Student Assistant.