Lenke Rothman: Quality of Life / Hsu Che-Yu with Chen Wan-Yin: ENTOMBED

Lenke Rothman: Quality of Life
The Kunstverein in Hamburg presents Quality of Life, the first comprehensive survey of the Swedish Hungarian artist Lenke Rothman outside of Sweden.  
 
From the 1950s until her death in 2008, Rothman developed a unique œuvre where aspects of the everyday are set against her biographical and historic backdrop. Characterised by the radical processing of a lived present after the Shoah, Rothman’s practice negotiates lines of temporality and transience through, amongst other things, the preservation of ephemeral and overlooked materials in a body of work that moves from abstract painting in the 1950s and 60s into the vocabulary of post-conceptual feminist sculpture in the 1970s and 80s. 
 
Rothman was immersed in the literary milieu in Sweden and shared a close friendship with Nobel Laureate Nelly Sachs. Despite her own foray into writing, Rothman’s work also testifies to the impossibility of language to give body to the past, entwined with an interminable energy for life perpetually moving forward.  
 
Through recurring gestures—sewing, mending and enveloping, carving texts into fabric or paper, holding together torn or decaying fragments, and at times charring her collected materials into form—Rothman gives substance to impermanence and memory alike, emphasising clothing as a membrane between fragile bodies and the world that surrounds them.  
 
Working serially, Rothman rehearses and repeats an iconography across Quality of Life. The umbrella, the rabbit, rain, and certain significant numbers, appear and reappear throughout, suggesting stitched timelines within her practice. They communicate the deeply personal while remaining ciphers of 20th century art history. Seen in this light, Rothman’s gestural poetics understand repair not only as a return to the original, but also as a form of continuation guided by the question: ‘How can life be saved and preserved despite constant destruction?’ 

Curated by Milan Ther and Sarah Messerschmidt. 

Guided tour with Elias Arnér, Director of the Estate of Lenke Rothman: Saturday, February 21, at 12 pm
The Roses of Nonexistence, Quinn Latimer on the work of Lenke Rothman, Thursday, April 23, at 8 pm 

With kind support from the Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung and the Rudolf Augstein Stiftung. 

Hsu Che-Yu with Chen Wan-Yin: ENTOMBED
ENTOMBED, a solo exhibition by Hsu Che-Yu in collaboration with Chen Wan-Yin, examines forms of political and spatial enclosure which render historical knowledge and collective memory inaccessible. 

In House a (2026), a new 2-channel video work commissioned by the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the artists investigate the shutdown of the covert Taiwanese nuclear programme, which ended operations in 1988 following U.S. intervention. After its closure, authorities sealed the plant’s underground laboratory with concrete, effectively entombing it. Here, moulding becomes a political operation: casting the space into permanence while suspending its legibility, fixing history as an immobilised form and a silent archive. Through interviews, digital simulations, and forensic imaging techniques, Hsu and Chen render the processes of enclosure tangible, treating the reconstruction of the past as a contested terrain, which is always politically situated. They investigate the historical site through digital technologies that generate eerie visuals with sculptural qualities, constructing spatial forms while leaving the entombed interior untouched and producing images that index absence.

Drawing on interviews with David Ho as well as other former nuclear scientists, and members of the Sawuazhi community affected by radioactive contamination, House a overlays technological memory with collective witnessing, framing memory as a situated practice where expertise, lived experience, and political responsibility converge.

Accompanying the installation is Accelerator (2026), a video work centred on the first linear particle accelerator built in Taiwan in the 1930s under Japanese colonial rule by physicist Bunsaku Arakatsu. The accelerator symbolises a technological link between colonial scientific infrastructure and militarised nuclear ambition. ENTOMBED foregrounds a structural affinity between these different sites, emphasising how technoscientific instruments, though framed as neutral research infrastructures, are embedded within military funding regimes, classified knowledge systems, and geopolitical strategies of control.

Curated by Dr Martin Karcher.

Artist talk, with Hsu Che-Yu and Dr Martin Karcher: Thursday, March 19, at 8 pm
An evening with Hsu Che-Yu, at Abaton Cinema Hamburg: Tuesday, April 14, at 7.30 pm 

With kind support from the Ministry of Culture of Taiwan.