Seven Works
June 10–July 9, 2025
Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg is pleased to announce Seven Works, a solo exhibition by Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino curated by Ana Druwe in collaboration with Halle für Kunst Lüneburg and Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society. The exhibition highlights the interplay between the institution’s archive, the university campus, and its historical connection with Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, exploring potential porosity between the university and the city.
Celestino explores agency and complicity within institutional systems. The selection of the seven existing score-based pieces taps into the surface of the space—architectural and organizational—with responsive, contingent negotiation to examine how familial ties, property regimes, and institutional procedures shape the terms of visibility, authorship, and access.
A public program is presented in collaboration with students of Leuphana Universität. As part of the seminar on Institutional Praxis, led by Susanne Leeb and Ana Druwe, the pedagogical program examines how communities and institutions negotiate shared spaces through notions of porosity. Throughout the semester, Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino has contributed to the seminar with practice-based exercises that speculate on futures, rethinking institutional gestures, and reimagining the organization of the university campus.
Their lecture “From Language” introduces linguistics as an operational force that structures contracts, performances, institutions, and forms of refusal. With the workshop Descriptions II, the artist invites students to consider the political aspect of grammatologically elucidating an object within a given context.
The group exhibition BE/HOLDING is curated by Marie-Sophie Dorsch and Lisa Deml at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, and it is organized in cooperation with the Kunstraum of Leuphana University Lüneburg, where Seven Works will run concurrently. Both exhibitions present works by Celestino that connect the two institutions.
Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Through score, sculpture, text, sound, and video, the artist addresses the remaining structures of the transatlantic colonial project, focusing on institutional critique, language, and objecthood. Celestino was awarded the ars viva 2025, Pampulha Grant 2024, and the Ducato Prize 2023.
Ana Druwe is currently a fellow at Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society. Her work pursues a critically reflective institutional practice. At Casa do Povo, a renowned cultural center in São Paulo, she creates collaborative projects that understand communication as a tool for participation and active co-creation of artistic spaces.
Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg is an organization dedicated to reconfiguring institutional critique as a proliferating form of institutional practice with exhibitions, lectures, workshops, conferences, film screenings, and performances. The Kunstraum allows students to work with artists and curators. Founded in 1993, it has collaborated with artists such as Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Park McArthur, and Christian Boltanski, as well as curators such as Marion von Osten, Alice Creischer, and Andreas Siekmann, to name a few.
Halle für Kunst Lüneburg was founded in 1995 by a group of students from Leuphana University. As a Kunstverein, it is relational in nature and relies on the engagement of its members to sustain an institutional rhythm. Interweaving solo and group exhibitions, mediation and education activities, publishing and research projects, the program is dedicated to emerging artists and underrepresented cultural practices. In 2020, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg was honored with the ADKV-ART COLOGNE Prize for Kunstvereine. 2025 marks the art association’s 30th anniversary, an occasion on which it sheds light on the administrative processes, support structures, and relational fabrics that have shaped its programs and publics.
The Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg is a research institute that contributes to developing and internationalizing the university’s main research priorities. Driven by an international fellowship program, it meets the challenges of a globalized present in a research-based way.
Production, Communication and Research by Jana Paim Costa and Litha Sabelfeld (Kunstraum Leuphana Lüneburg). Special thanks to Maria Sophie Dorsch and Lisa Deml (Halle für Kunst Lüneburg), Ulf Wuggenig, Susanne Leeb and Sabrina Bollhof.
