Kickoff for the Schaufler Residency 2026 with Quadrature and Professor Alexander Kemnitz: The Gravity of Capital - Art, Economy and Data in Dialogue

On April 22, 2026, the Schaufler Residency@TU Dresden 2026 got off to a successful start with a public artist talk at the COSMO Science Forum. The guest was the artist duo Quadrature (Juliane Götz and Sebastian Neitsch), who presented their current artistic research project The Mass of Money as part of the 2026 residency.

The evening focused on an interdisciplinary exchange between art and Business Administration and Economics: together with Alexander Kemnitz (Chair of Economics, esp. Economic Policy and Economic Research) , the duo discussed fundamental structures of global and national economic systems. The focus was on questions of wealth distribution and inequality as well as the role and (in)transparency of economic data - topics that shape current social dynamics in a special way.

Based on these theoretical and empirical problems, The Mass of Money develops an independent artistic perspective: Quadrature transforms economic processes into cosmological models and thus creates a visual and spatial language that makes the often invisible forces of capital - its circulations, condensations and gravitational fields - tangible to the senses. In this interweaving of data, simulation and imagination, the project opens up new spaces for reflection for the understanding of complex economic relationships.

The talk was moderated by Pauline Hohn, Curatorial Assistant at the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden, and was extended by a lively discussion with the audience. The discussion was recorded as a podcast and will soon be published in the You Ask We Explain series.

The successful kick-off event will be followed by another event at the beginning of June. After the kick-off event last week, there will be a continuation on 04/05/06/2026 with the artist duo QUADRATURE. Alexander Kemnitz and Lars Hornuf from the faculty will take part in a participatory workshop on the dynamics of capital accumulation and its social consequences in the SLUB's Open Sience Lab. More information about the workshop