Image credits see below

Future Continuous
Hamburg Grants for Visual Arts 2025

6.12.2025 – 25.1.2026
Kunsthaus Hamburg

Participating artists: Francesca Bertin, Maxime Chabal, Wassili Franko, Katharina Kohl, Lila-Zoé Krauß, Nina Kuttler, Ruxin Liu, Katja Pilipenko, Sohorab Rabbey, Kristina Savutsina

The Hamburg Grants for Visual Arts of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg provide fascinating insights into the city’s production of art and its recent developments. The final exhibition, entitled Future Continuous, presents the works produced by the recipients of 2025 during their scholarship period, accompanied by the Kunsthaus Hamburg. In spatial, sound and video installations, they address pressing topics of our time, ranging from the examination of ecological interdependence or how we deal with artificial intelligence to an exploration of the history of psychiatry and questions revolving around intimacy and collective care.

The Ministry of Culture and Media Hamburg has been supporting promising Hamburg artists with these grants since 1981. In 2025, the accompanying exhibition will adopt a new focus: the emphasis will be on supporting artistic production, promoting visibility and creating fruitful relationships – among the participating artists themselves and in dialogue with external curators, authors and the public. Year upon year, this will be giving rise to new possibilities and connections well worth discovering.

Catalogue accompanying the exhibition

Image 1: Kristina Savutsina, Kramatorsker Wand (working title), 2023–ongoing, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025, Courtesy the artist, camera: Georg Kußmann
Image 2: Nina Kuttler, Measuring the Curve of the Tail, 2022, Courtesy the artist
Image 3: Katja Pilipenko, In Search of Lost Security, 2022, Installation view ICAT – Institute for Contemporary Art & Transfer, Hamburg, Photo: Jaewon Kim
Image 4: Sohorab Rabbey, LANDLESS TALE, 2023-2025, Courtesy the artist
Image 5: Ruxin Liu, A Kind of Lesbian Desire, 2024, Courtesy Ruxin Liu
Image 6: Maxime Chabal, Ghost Image, 2024, Courtesy the artist
Image 7: Lila-Zoé Krauß, [After her Destruction], 2023, Courtesy the artist
Image 8: Katharina Kohl, Das Gedächtnis der Hilanderas, 2023, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025, Courtesy the artist
Image 9: Wassili Franko, Karl May Buchumschlag, 2024, Courtesy the artist
Image 10: Francesca Bertin, TARA, 2020, Courtesy the artist

Supported by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Ministry of Culture and Media

Cho Ari, Akazi, Barocco, Arirang, 2025, Courtesy the artist, Photos: Sarah Thielsen

Whisper Down the Lane –
Cho Ari

6 November 2025 – 1 February 2026
Kunsthaus foyer

Starting from the concept of eco-memory, Cho Ari‘s wall and sound installation Akazi, Barocco, Arirang approaches two interwoven biographies: that of Korean nurse Lee Kye-soon, who migrated to Hamburg in the 1960s as a so-called guest worker, and that of the acacia tree, a species that spread along colonial routes between Europe and Asia. Both embody transgenerational trajectories of uprooting and transformation. Through these intertwined stories, the artist embarks on a sensual search for traces, in which memory appears not only as a human and linguistic phenomenon, but as something that circulates through our environment.

At the center of the work lies the Korean folk song Arirang. It serves as an acoustic archive of collective emotions and as a carrier of han (deep sorrow). Cho Ari weaves Arirang with baroque variation, ultrasonic sounds captured from the plant world, and the voice of Kang Jun, Lee Kye-soon’s daughter, creating a shift within which human and non-human memories coexist. While the sound vibrates through the temporal and structural dissolution of memory, the wall installation appears as the surface where its residue briefly settles into matter. Its perforated plane is printed with photographic negatives and is patterned after the oscillation waves that arise from the interference between plant signals and the human voice. It acts as a permeable membrane at the threshold between the visible and the hidden, the present and the absent. In that way, the artist creates an auditory and material liminal space, in which memory becomes perceptible as a dynamic, interspecies network.

In the experimental and communicative exhibition format Whisper Down the Lane, the roles and functions of hosting and being hosted become fluid: in line with the eponymous children’s game, the exhibiting artists themselves choose the next person. With the project, the Kunsthaus transfers part of the curatorial responsibility to the artists themselves, with the aim of creating alternative institutional modes of access and rendering local network structures visible both in terms of personal ties and with regard to artistic approaches. So far, works by Jaewon Kim, Fritz Lehmann, Altay Tuz, Pia Pospischil, Luzia Cruz and Laurel Chokoago have been shown as part of Whisper Down the Lane.

In her interdisciplinary artistic practice, Cho Ari (*1992) explores the porous boundaries where embodiment, materiality, and interspecies agency intersect within ever-shifting ecological and perceptual environments. In 2025, she completed her Master of Fine Arts at the HFBK Hamburg. Her work has been exhibited at SENDER, Hamburg (2025); Satellit, Hamburg (2025), Galerie Flut, Bremen (2024), and her performances and publications have been presented at Galerie Klosterfelde Edition, Berlin (2024); I Never Read, Basel (2025) and La Chambre de Bonne, Paris (2025), among others.

Thursday, 6 November 2025, 6 pm
Opening
in the context of Panorama XVIII with RVDS & GGG

Installation view: Jil Lahr. Sticky Business, Kunsthaus Hamburg 2023, Photos: Antje Sauer

Jil Lahr
Sticky Business

From 11 November 2023
Kunsthaus Hamburg

Like in the cabinets of curiosities from the early phase of the museum history, Jil Lahr mixes objects of different origins and purposes to create space-related installations, drawing on an extensive collection. Removed from their original settings, the objects of global everyday life trigger new associations, which often reveal the bizarre and humorous nature of massproduced items. By taking them out of their conventional context of use, the artist addresses Western consumerism and refers to entertainment culture.

For the toilets of the Kunsthaus, Jil Lahr has developed the permanent installation Sticky Business. She intuitively redesigned the rooms using stickers that depict stones from her own archive. The natural objects, charged with personal memories, float in space and provide a wry commentary on the functional interior.