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). Performing Landscapes 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, Camilo Pachón & Sara Alvarado, Elizabeth Price, and Silke Schatz.

The exhibition has been curated by Lisa Oord and Hanne König and was realized in close collaboration with the participating students of HfG Karlsruhe and the contributing artists. It developed out of the seminar “Performing Landscapes“ led by Professor Céline Condorelli and Hanne König at HfG Karlsruhe. The project is generously supported by Museumsverein Düren e.V.

June 13, 2026 – September 6, 2026

Leopold Hoesch Museum
Hoeschplatz 1
52349 Düren

Opening:
Friday, June 12, 2026, 7:00 p.m.

Speakers at the opening:
Verena Schloemer, Chair of the Cultural Committee of the City of Düren
Markus Mascher, Deputy Director of the LHM
Lisa Oord and Hanne König, curators of the exhibition

Admission to the opening is free.

As part of the opening, a performance will take place outdoors at 8 p.m.
The exhibition will open in conjunction with “Adrián Balseca. A Ciasmatic Body.”