Spring program 2024

Kunstverein Braunschweig is pleased to present its spring program.

Dennis Siering: Unnatural Territories
December 2, 2023–February 25, 2024

In his artistic practice, Dennis Siering deals with possible and actual scenarios of the substantial change of the earth due to the industrial age. To this end, Siering explores landscape scenarios in the age of the Anthropocene and combines natural materials with synthetic ones—often in an aesthetic of industrial production. His works visualize possible future models of landscapes. What at first glance looks like questionable visions of the future has in some respects long since become the inescapable reality of our present: the effects of human activity have long since become part of our environment in the form of anthropogenic pollution.

While just under 2 million tons of plastic were produced worldwide every year in the 1950s, this figure has risen to around 400 million tons annually today. Due to its enormously long shelf life, it can be assumed that all plastics ever produced are still present on our planet and will eventually be connected to it. On his online platform pyroplastics.org, Siering devotes himself to a relatively little-researched phenomenon of special plastic waste in the sea. Due to maritime weather conditions, these plastic clumps take on the appearance of natural stones over time and can increasingly be found in coastal regions. The constantly changing and expanding platform brings together the latest scientific research, speculative scenarios, photographs and videos to approach so-called pyroplastics in a variety of ways—therefore, the pyroplastic finds could also be understood as a kind of readymade, which sharpens Siering’s artistic practice.

As part of his exhibition Unnatural Territories, Dennis Siering presents works from the past five years and numerous new productions. With installations, sculptures and video works, he creates his very own dramaturgy that completely takes over the first floor of the Villa Salve Hospes.

Curator: Jule Hillgärtner
Curatorial assistance: Monja Remmers

Anna Ehrenstein: Imagined Inevitabilities with Osiriz33, V.f.V. Braunschweig, Mahube Diseko and Brian Montshiwa
December 2, 2023–February 25, 2024

For her solo exhibition Imagined Inevitabilities with Osiriz33, V.f.V. Braunschweig, Mahube Diseko and Brian Montshiwa, Anna Ehrenstein conceives new artworks together with international and local collaborators that question the conditions of our coexistence in the 21st century with vigor, wit and urgency. The artist brings together a multitude of voices and protagonists who decisively expand the circle of cultural practitioners.

The new three-channel video Chommie—the digital closet (2023), produced in collaboration with Johannesburg-based artists and activists Brian Montshiwa and Mahube Diseko, is dedicated to LGBTIQA+ rights in South Africa, Germany and a globalized world, the ambivalences of media commercialization and real-life discrimination, and the power of algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and digitality in relation to the visibility of the global queer community.

Moreover, in the summer of 2023, Ehrenstein initiated readings and workshops with young athletes from the local weightlifting club V.f.V. Braunschweig, which took place both at the Kunstverein and in the gym. Based on these experiences, and in collaboration with Leonidas Emre Pakkan aka Osiriz33, rapper, artist, and actor, the video installation Passdeutscha (2023) was created: an urgent music video that tackles police violence and racism, and counters the dominant German integration discourse with radical diversity.

Imagined Inevitabilities thus creates a contact zone that invites an expansive reflection on the current contradictions of diversity and integration discourse, globalization, and digital capitalism. Thereby, Ehrenstein’s artistic works function as a pointed counter-speech to the bleak, normative, and increasingly hateful condition of dominant social reality. Through emphatical collaborative working processes, Ehrenstein builds an emancipatory multitude based on the recognition of situated knowledge and activates marginal ways of speaking, listening and working together, suggesting that seemingly contradictory concerns need not compete with but rather empower each other.

Curator: Benedikt Johannes Seerieder

Further information about the extensive public program accompanying the exhibitions can be found here.

Preview 2024

March 16–June 2, 2024
Bärbel Lange
Johanna Hedva

June 22–October 6, 2024
Patricia Kaersenhout

December 7, 2024–February 23, 2025
Özlem Altın and others

The exhibitions are supported by: