Exhibition series in the Cabinet: Sophie Lindner, Neozoon, Andrea Grützner

"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 ‘Dieses ist das Bild der Welt, Die man für die beste hält’ (This is the image of the world that one considers the best), taken from a poem by 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 September 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 (September to November 2025) and the photographer Andrea Grützner (November 2025 to January 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 projects and exhibition projects over the past fifteen years. 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 the exhibition projects that have been carried out, show 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 "thinking planetarily" (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 in Hamburg.

#2 Collective Neozoon

With teaching objects from the TUD's forest zoology and forest zoology teaching collection
November 2025 to March 2026

#3 Andrea Grützner

With artifacts from the Herbarium Dresdense and the Soil Science Collection, TUD
March to July 2026