ARNSBERG.- Kunstverein Arnsberg announces its programme for 2024–2025: “SWAMPING,” curated by Pauline Doutreluingne, explores how changing ecologies manifest themselves in artistic practice, particularly at the interface between water and land, between physical and mental ideological landscapes. The concept of the swamp has been demonized for centuries as a way of dealing with the uncanny, the unknown, the uncertain and the unstable. Today, swamps are protected as valuable habitats for rare animal and plant species. Rising sea levels, the threat of storms, and flooding—all direct consequences of climate change—seem to be bringing these wetlands back today and in the near future.

Alongside a selection of new and existing works by established and emerging international visual artists from various disciplines, ecologists and activists are invited to collectively create an artistic sensibility and imagination for an ecological past, present and future: SWAMPING consists of a collective performance, four solo exhibitions, and a symposium. The programme serves as a projection surface to pose various socially and ecologically inspired artistic questions.

Inspired by the richness of biodiversity revealed by the wetland, SWAMPING addresses the power of diversity and differentiation as a methodological approach to challenge traditional binary oppositions such as nature/culture, human/non-human and pave the way for non-hierarchical relationships. What does it mean to make exhibitions and artistic works in wet spaces, –on, in and under water? New paradigms in exhibition practice, such as the transition from “dry” to “wet” exhibition spaces, as well as the development into future-oriented virtual spaces are discussed.

Performances and augmented reality works about the ecological conditions of the Lippe and Ruhr, including their floodplains will be shown in public. News will be announced here.

Programme

June 9–30, 2024: Lundahl & Seitl—River Biographies (collective performance and exhibition)
In River Biographies the audience explores embodiments of natural elements of stone and water to collectively form a river. The international co-production and collaboration between institutions is located on rivers and waterways, including the Southbank Center (Thames), Chronus Art Center (Huangpu River), and Istanbul Modern (Bosphorus).

April 13–June 8, 2025: Adriano Amaral (exhibition)
Amaral combines organic and synthetic or industrial materials. In his work numerous dichotomies such as natural/artificial, abstract/figurative, material/immaterial, ecology/technology play a role, encouraging the viewer to reflect on our changing physical and mental relationship with nature, technology and transcendence.

June 27–August 30, 2025: Patricia Domínguez (exhibition)
Patricia Domínguez sees art as a field of possibilities that can disrupt existing political narratives. For her exhibition at Kunstverein Arnsberg she explores the complex flows of water in terms of the possibilities of weeping, healing and spirituality in the digital age.

June 28–29, 2025: Wetlands for the Future (panel/symposium/activations)
In Wetlands for the Future, local and international ecologists, geologists, students (MA Spatial Strategies, Weissensee School of Arts) and artists who deal with the possible future and the past of wetlands will speak and perform. The starting point is the question of how artists explore the marshland as a poetic, social and ecological potential and as a hybrid space.​

Sept 12–Nov 16, 2025: Elise Eeraerts and Roberto Aparicio Ronda (exhibition)
In a thought-provoking, often visceral manner, Elise Eeraerts and Roberto Aparicio Ronda allow current conventions of the Anthropocene to collide with ideas and traditions with which man has appropriated and continues to appropriate nature. For Kunstverein Arnsberg, the artist duo delves into the world of the swamp, where fables and facts intersect.

Artistic Director Kunstverein Arnsberg: Pauline Doutreluingne.