Exhibition series in the Cabinet: Sophie Lindner, Neozoon, Andrea Grützner
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"This is the picture of the world that is considered the best". A series of exhibitions in the Cabinet of the University Gallery on the theme of Art & Science by the Office for Academic Heritage, Scientific and Art Collections in cooperation with the TUD's teaching and research collections
May 2025 to July 2026
Gallery of the Office for Academic Heritage, Scientific and Art Collections in the Görges Building, TUD
Curatorial team: Gwendolin Kremer, Andreas Kempe
Under the title "This is the picture of the world that one considers to be the best" (loosely based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), the Office for Academic Heritage Scientific, and Art Collections of the TUD is showing contemporary positions by installation and performance artist Sophie Lindner (May to November 2025) on two floors of the Gallery of the Office for Academic Heritage Scientific, and Art Collections in the Görges Building, the filmmaker collective NEOZOON (November 2025 to March 2026) and the photographer Andrea Grützner (March to July 2026) in dialog with scientific teaching and research objects from the university collections.
The potential of artistic research for the development and visualization of university teaching and research collections has been demonstrated in scientific and exhibition projects over the past fifteen years. Using the example of the Artist in Residence programmes docked at the Office for Academic Heritage, Scientific and Art Collections, such as the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden on Artificial Intelligence and Data Worlds or the S+T+ARTS Ec(h)o programme, as well as exhibition projects, it becomes clear how artistic means can be used to question and contextualize scientific topics against the backdrop of teaching and research objects and, in the best case, expand them to gain new insights. Artistic-speculative research can make the learning and processual character of science tangible in an exemplary way using historical collection items. At first glance, the overarching themes of the residencies docked with us have no connection to the university collections. Rather, they refer to computer science, engineering and the natural sciences - flanked by the essential smaller humanities and social sciences here in Dresden.
It is therefore reasonable to assume that the artists applying are primarily interested in high-performance computing and unusual visualization practices that primarily take place in the digital realm. Far from it! Our experience over the past eight years has shown that it is precisely the objects from the diverse and top-class collections that inspire the artists and help them to concretize their research ideas. The objects in the collections are not simply a vehicle, but usually a central object of research. As materialized bodies of knowledge, the teaching objects serve to embed futurology in a history of knowledge and at the same time assume a mediating function as an independent artistic work.
Over the past fifteen years, scientific knowledge has received increased public attention when political actors demand and demand research, expertise and recommendations for action from science or even intervene in this field. Universities and thus also university collections and Office for Academic Heritage, Scientific and Art Collections are extremely challenged in this regard; the focus is on the credible and comprehensible communication of scientific issues, findings and debates to society at large. The recourse to or activation of teaching objects in the context of artistic research programs such as ours at the Office for Academic Heritage, Scientific and Art Collections can therefore make a substantial contribution to establishing university collections as a research infrastructure.
Gerfried Stocker, Artistic Director of Ars Electronica and member of the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden Advisory Board, has also confirmed that it is precisely our university's collections that guarantee us a unique selling point in the context of scientific and transdisciplinary programs at an international level.
#1 Sophie Lindner: Celestial Classrooms - Observatories and the Planetary
With photographs from the Hermann Krone Collection of the Institute of Applied Physics (IAP) and objects from the Astronomical-Geodetic Collection and the Cartographic Collection, TUD
May 19 to November 14, 2025
The cabinet series kicks off with installation and performance artist Sophie Lindner, who lives in Leipzig. Photographs, drawings and objects by the artist as well as archive materials from East German observatories collected by her will be presented in an installative arrangement alongside experimental photographs by photography pioneer Hermann Krone and objects from the Astronomical-Geodetic Collection and the Cartographic Collection. Sophie Lindner deliberately incorporates the material heritage of the observatories in the GDR, which represent a very special cosmos of the history of knowledge and social policy in the 20th century, into her installations in order to highlight the historical connections between transformation and the transfer of knowledge.
At the heart of Lindner's "Environment Observatory" is the question of the relationship between man and the cosmos in the context of science and art. Artistic-speculative appropriation practices of world views and paradigms for a newly conceived planet-human relationship in the age of the Anthropocene are put up for discussion. The artistic figures she has developed, such as the "Spiritual Astronaut" or the "Planetary Nurses", are concerned with the well-being of planetary relationships when they attempt to make the interaction and relationship between humans and the Earth visible and tangible in all its forms. As proxies or representatives of a new knowing entity, they plant fruit trees or keep an eye out for the planetary. Ultimately, Sophie Lindner sees her artistic practice as a continuation of concepts of the cosmological, which she translates anecdotally and poetically into object arrangements and performative participatory formats.
The fascination with planet Earth and outer space is ancient. Even in pre-ancient times, cosmology played a central role in gaining a better understanding of our own habitat and the universe. The objects and educational charts from the Astronomical-Geodetic Collection, the Cartographic Collection and the Hermann Krone Collection provide a brief insight into the instruments and materials used in science and (academic) education. However, the teaching objects were primarily used to make the cosmos accessible to people and were not intended to depict a relational relationship in the sense of "planetary thinking" (Claus Leggewie).
Sophie Lindner (*1990 in Jena, lives and works in Leipzig) studied from 2011 to 2017 at the Dresden University of Fine Arts (HfBK Dresden) in the class of Prof. Ulrike Grossarth and has been a master student of Prof. Stefanie Wenner since 2024. Lindner is a member of the collective CindyCat, a free union of cultural workers (https://cindycat.net). She currently works as an artistic lecturer at the HfBK Dresden. Her works have been shown in numerous exhibitions and performed as part of lecture performances; she has received several sponsorship awards, including from the Liebelt Foundation Hamburg.
Further information on the exhibition and the accompanying program can be found in the flyer here.
Sophie Lindner: Spirituelle Astronautin
#2 NEOZOON: REHEARSAL
With teaching objects from the Zoological Teaching Collection of the TUD
December 5, 2025 to January 29, 2026
We are entering the second round of the cabinet exhibition series with the artist collective NEOZOON. The exhibition PROBE is created in dialog with the Zoological Teaching Collection of the TUD, in which a new cluster is created on exhibits confiscated by German customs, such as (exotic) animals covered by the Species Protection Act, their skins, teeth, feathers, as well as other specimens that are on permanent loan to the university for teaching purposes.
"Specimen" means experiment, test and random sample at the same time. Under this ambiguous sign, NEOZOON focuses on objects that oscillate between trophy, contraband, piece of evidence and teaching aid: artifacts confiscated by customs whose circulation was interrupted at the interfaces of desire, prohibition and knowledge order. These "samples" materialize legal and control regimes of species protection as well as globalized commodity chains and their image politics.
In our exhibition PROBE, they refer to naturalia confiscated by the customs authorities as "second-order objects": these are "things" whose primary reference, i.e. the direct reference to the animal and its habitat, is overlaid by a secondary level of meaning or attribution. These objects function as evidence of social operations and infrastructures such as trade, law, customs, collection or media and document less "nature" itself than the conditions of its visualization. The gaze thus shifts from the object to the system that produces, circulates, regulates and exhibits the object.
PROBE is therefore an observation of observation. The exhibition reveals the logics of control and medialization and binds the collective's practice closely to the object in a research-based approach to found material and an analytical and at the same time ironic view.
The artist collective NEOZOON was founded in 2009 in Berlin/Paris. The artists work with collage, found footage and montage in their films and installative video works. Their works question the iconography of speciesism and expose the ambivalences in which non-human beings appear as a resource, projection screen and legal object all at the same time.
Further information can be found in the exhibition leaflet.
NEOZOON: Carré Jungle Love (ab 2017)
#3 Andrea Grützner
With artifacts from the Herbarium Dresdense and the TUD Soil Science Collection
In cooperation with bautzner69/publish & print Raum + Verlag
March until July 2026