Models can take on physical and conceptual forms: they are built, folded, drawn, or generated digitally; but they also structure ideas, knowledge, and possible actions. In both cases, they are not neutral representations of a world that precedes them. They emerge through building and experimentation as well as through thinking and imagining; they select, organize, generate resistance, and open up possibilities.
This lecture applies these reflections to exhibition-making as a curatorial and design practice of organizing and establishing relationships. It proposes understanding exhibitions as speculative model spaces that unfold their own mode of existence. They are more than places of (re)presentation and more than purely fictional experimental arrangements: they refer to the world, history, and knowledge, while simultaneously bringing about real spatial, material, and social constellations in the here and now. By relating images, objects, texts, bodies, stories, and spaces to one another, they structure attention, visibility, knowledge, and participation. In doing so, they also create narrative worlds: they connect, interrupt, and superimpose stories, and help determine what is considered narratable, visible, and memorable.
Starting with the question “What if?”, this lecture explores how curatorial and design practices open up fluid constellations in which alternative spaces of thought and relationship take shape. Selection, scale, material, and arrangement can reveal, affirm, or shift familiar systems of order—such as chronology, the canon, authorship, or the separation of nature and culture. Using examples from the speaker’s own exhibition practice, as well as reflections on materiality, geological time scales, and non-human relationships, the lecture examines how exhibitions not only represent reality but can also help to create it as real spaces of alternative relationships.

Hanna Krüger, born in Berlin in 1979, studied product design at the Kassel Art Academy and curatorial studies at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. She works as a designer, exhibition architect, and curator, and co-directs the Kassel-based design studio Gebert & Krüger with Jakob Gebert.
Her work operates at the intersections of design, art, cultural techniques, natural history collections, and practices of knowledge, and is characterized by a transdisciplinary approach. Hanna Krüger explores how materials, spaces, images, and narratives shape knowledge, perception, and relationships. In her exhibition projects, she combines artistic, design, and curatorial perspectives to create spatial narratives in which aesthetic, cultural, and social issues intersect.
With Gebert & Krüger, she has realized exhibition projects for, among others, the Dresden State Art Collections, the MAK in Vienna, GRIMMWELT in Kassel, and the Bavarian State Natural History Collections. In addition, she regularly teaches at universities, including the Kassel Art Academy and Burg Giebichenstein in Halle.

Hanna Krüger was invited by the Department of Exhibition Design.

The event will be held in German.

Image credits: Hanna Krüger