Art Laboratory Berlin

Art Laboratory Berlin (ALB) is a multiple award winning art and research platform founded in 2006 by an international team of artists and art historians, including co-directors Regine Rapp and Christian de Lutz, who have led the institution ever since. From its founding, ALB has been dedicated to presenting interdisciplinary art projects in an international context, with its central focus resting at the interface of art, science and technology, an orientation that has, in recent years, sharpened further toward artistic research and the life sciences specifically.

Over nearly two decades, ALB's programme has unfolded through a series of long term thematic strands, each combining exhibitions, talks, workshops and conferences into a sustained line of inquiry rather than isolated projects. These have included Time and Technology, Synaesthesia, the macrobiologies and microbiologies series exploring the biosphere from organism to molecule, Nonhuman Subjectivities and Nonhuman Agents examining art in the post-anthropocentric era, the long running Mind the Fungi collaboration with the Technical University Berlin's Institute of Biotechnology, and the ongoing DIY Hack the Panke research group, among many others. This consistency of thematic development across more than fifty curated exhibitions has established ALB as what one reviewer described as a rare instance of serious interdisciplinary thinking, and it has earned recognition in the German and international press as a nucleus for BioArt practice in the city.

ALB's contemporary importance rests on this sustained bridging of contemporary art with scientific research, achieved through close, long term collaboration with individual artists whose creative processes are followed and made visible through exhibitions and public programming, an inductive curatorial approach that places the artwork itself, rather than theory, at the centre of inquiry. This approach is described by the institution as sustainable curating. ALB's academic partnerships extend across Berlin's major universities and research institutes, including the Freie Universitat, Humboldt Universitat, Technische Universitat, the Berlin University of the Arts and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, alongside an international network of art science organisations reaching from Ljubljana to Tokyo.

The institution's core organisational pillars, articulated as research, exhibition, education and publication, structure its year round activity, from artist in lab residencies such as the current Chrysalis programme to its long standing public Colloquium series and an extensive publication record spanning academic presses and peer reviewed scientific journals. This four part structure reflects ALB's ambition to move fluidly between curatorial practice and scholarly contribution.

ALB is sustained by a combination of public and private funding built up over many years, with particular support from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe and the Berlin Senate Department for Higher Education and Research, alongside the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, the Goethe Institut, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the European Union, the Lotto Stiftung Berlin, the Stiftung Kunstfonds and the Wellcome Trust, a funding base that reflects the sustained trust ALB has built across cultural, scientific and academic institutions over nearly twenty years.