Christina Landbrecht

Christina Landbrecht completed her studies in History of Art, Business Administration and Romance Languages in February 2009. Over several years at the Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art, she acquired considerable curatorial experience and returned to the Humboldt-Universität to write her doctoral thesis on a currently much-debated topic. Her thesis is concerned with the influence of the natural sciences on contemporary art. More precisely, she investigates artistic practices and exhibition strategies that draw inspiration from natural scientific methods and working environments, such as the laboratory, and use these as the basis for creative work. Her objective is to critically examine works, exhibitions and production conditions, and to analyse their interferences.

The central focus of her project will be, firstly, redesigning a 200-square-metre laboratory. Within this facility, Norbert Koch’s working group will work on surface and interface physics to explore supermolecular systems. In a second step, supervised by Jürgen P. Rabe, she will plan a 1000-square-metre core facility for the Integrative Research Institute for the Sciences at the Humboldt-Universität’s Campus Adlershof. The design of these new laboratories must accommodate the experimental needs of the researchers who will work there in future, whilst the functional organisation will be confronted with historically different spatial configurations and communication structures as found in other settings. The aim is to achieve a new, innovative laboratory design (experimentalisation) through comparative visual studies of space and interviews (historicisation).