Temporary Gallery. Centre for contemporary art

Temporary Gallery is a non-profit centre for contemporary art in Cologne dedicated to the intersection of artistic and curatorial practice with theory, and to their discourse and embedding within a wider cultural, historical, scientific, and social context. Rather than presenting exhibitions as isolated events, Temporary Gallery understands its programme as an ongoing, interdependent process — one in which exhibitions, research, mediation, and cooperation are cornerstones of equal weight.

Central to this approach is the concept of the "permacultural institution," a framework developed at Temporary Gallery that reimagines the art institution not as a fixed container optimised for growth, novelty, and turnover, but as a living system shaped by care, diversity, regeneration, and interdependence. Borrowing its core principles from permaculture, the concept asks what it means for an institution to cultivate long-term relationships — with artists, with audiences, with collaborating institutions, and with its own ecological and social environment — rather than treating each exhibition as a discrete, self-contained output. This means working with recurring collaborators over years rather than single projects; allowing formats, research threads, and institutional structures to grow and change organically; and treating sustainability as something institutional and social as much as environmental.

This orientation informs every level of the programme. Exhibitions are developed in close, often long-term dialogue with artists, and are accompanied by discursive formats — symposia, lecture and film series, publications — that extend and complicate the questions raised on the exhibition floor. Temporary Gallery regularly initiates cross-institutional collaborations and research projects with other Kunstvereine, universities, and international partners, treating knowledge production as inherently collective. Accessibility is understood as a curatorial and institutional value rather than an add-on: this includes Leichte Sprache (Easy Language) formats, attention to physical access, and family-friendly programming, all conceived as extensions of the institution's commitment to who gets to participate in contemporary art discourse and on what terms. Individual project consultations for artists and curators further embed Temporary Gallery within a broader ecology of practice rather than positioning it solely as an exhibition venue.

Founded in 2008 and operating since 2012 as a non-profit art association with institutional support from the City of Cologne, Temporary Gallery was awarded the ADKV-ART COLOGNE Prize in 2018 and *WESTSTERN prize for cultural participation, critical discourses and institutional responsibility. It continues to position itself at the threshold between artistic experimentation, curatorial reflection, and institutional self-inquiry — treating the question of how an institution should work as inseparable from the question of what it shows.

Aneta Rostkowska has been the artistic and managing director of Temporary Gallery since January 2019. She holds an MA in Philosophy and a BA in Economics, and her curatorial and theoretical work centers on the concept of the "permacultural institution," which she has developed through the programme at Temporary Gallery. She is also a guest professor at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). Since April 2026, Temporary Gallery has been jointly led by Rostkowska and Lisa Klosterkötter in a shared leadership model, reflecting the institution's own commitment to distributed, collaborative structures of care and responsibility as an extension of its permacultural approach to institutional practice.