Art Laboratory Berlin is delighted to invite you to take part in our Colloquium (this time on-site!), a discursive format on research in art, science and humanities, curated by Regine Rapp.

The colloquium addresses an international interdisciplinary research audience to present and discuss past, present or future projects by artists and scholars, curators or editors from the fields of art, science and the humanities. The topics could refer to an art project, a book, text or chapter, a research or exhibition project, a lab experiment, a lecture series, a conference concept or other.

The presentations and exchange will focus on the work-in-progress. Methodological approaches – theoretical or practical – are also of great interest here. While researching, we often tend to shift between practical inquiry and theoretical research, browsing various disciplines. Following the original meaning of colloquium as “speaking together”, we want to provide a platform for exchange and embrace various kinds of work processes which are often not seen or talked about.

Structure of the sessions: Each session will include two presentations followed by discussions, altogether 90 min. The colloquium welcomes informal conversations amongst the participants.

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Speakers on 17 March 2026 Session:

Dr Karolina Żyniewicz (PL/DE), Artist and Researche | The Self Defense Project

Dr Karolina Żyniewicz (PL/DE) is a Berlin-based artist&researcher&educator, a liminal being, existing and performing between various contexts and disciplines. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Visual Arts of the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź and holds PhD in cultural sciences (obtained in the transdisciplinary program Nature-Culture at Artes Liberales Faculty, University of Warsaw). While executing art&research projects based mainly on biotechnology and medicine, she also conducts ethnographic and autoethnographic observations. The topics of her work are often related to broadly understood life and death and their social and biological dimensions. Her work is strongly process-oriented, so she often participates in residencies, like the European Media Art Platform (EMAP) at Kontejner Zagreb or Coalesce in Buffalo, NY, and group projects, like Stretching Senses School by Humboldt Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity. She exhibited internationally, for instance, at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin, Kontejner Zagreb, or The Center of Contemporary Art Łaźnia in Gdańsk, Poland. Additionally, she is an associate reviewer of the Technoetic Arts journal. In 2026 she published her first book titled The Body as Matter of Art and Science. Autoethnography of transmattering.

The Self Defense Project
How do you understand self-defense? What do you need to defend yourself against? How do you defend yourself? These are the questions Karolina Żyniewicz asks in her ongoing project titled Self Defense. The project is grounded in the current global threat of war, as well as in a feeling of technological domination and overstimulation. As nonhuman partners in our self-defensive strategies, she turns to plants, particularly those with a dual healing and killing potential. They function as natural weapons in many senses yet have been largely overshadowed by technological tools. Since spring 2025, she has been collecting toxic plants, both individually and within workshop groups. Being and learning together also becomes a defensive strategy. Karolina engages in the traditional craft of embroidery – using threads soaked in poisonous plant sap – as a relaxing, meditative, and body-engaging activity that helps defend against mental and physical exhaustion. In 2026, the development of the project is supported by a scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

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Prof. Dr. Regine Hengge, ExC Matters of Activity and Institute of Biology/Microbiology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Human-curated Plant-microbe Interactions in Science and Art

Prof. Dr. Regine Hengge, Professor of Microbiology at Humboldt University Berlin, pioneered research on how bacteria survive harsh stress conditions, with a focus on molecular signaling and regulation and the complex architecture and morphogenesis of bacterial biofilms. In the Excellence Cluster Matters of Activity, she explores the fabrics and forms of life at the interfaces of science and art. Her projects range from bacterial cellulose as a self-growing living material for design to fermentative textile dyeing and visual re-enactments of plant-microbe interactions in art projects. Based on combined anthropological, historical and molecular microbiological studies of traditional medicinal and craft practices, she has developed the concept of human-curated multi-species interactions as a basis for more sustainable technology. For her scientific research she received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize and an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant. She is an elected member of Leopoldina, EMBO and other scientific academies.

Some thirteen years ago, Regine Hengge began to combine her long-standing scientific expertise on bacterial biofilms, which represent the multicellular life form of bacteria and cause chronic infections (e.g., of wounds), with a certain personal family tradition with classical medicinal plants by investigating whether healing plants traditionally used against such chronic infections contain agents that inhibit bacterial biofilm formation. This led to a deep study of plant-microbe interactions at the molecular level and the insight that not only traditional medicine but also certain traditional craft practices – such as techniques of traditional organic textile dyeing – make extensive use of these complex interactions by harnessing the intricate self-defense of plants against microbes settling on their surfaces for human benefit. Based on interdisciplinary anthropological, historical and molecular microbiological studies of traditional medicinal and craft practices, she has developed the concept of human-curated multi-species or, in particular, plant-microbe interactions as a basis for a future more sustainable medicine and technology. Finally, these striking plant-microbe interactions are also visualized in her laboratory within the context of ongoing art and exhibition projects.