Utopia. The Right to Hope – A Symposium
12/13/2025, 11 AM – 6 PM

Andreas Beitin is a museum director and curator. He studied art history, applied cultural studies, and modern and contemporary history. After completing his doctorate in 2004, he worked at the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe. He initially held various academic and curatorial positions there before becoming its director in 2010. Since then, Beitin has curated or cocurated numerous internationally acclaimed exhibitions. He publishes scholarly texts in Germany and abroad, gives lectures, and has edited numerous publications. He has served on art juries and academic committees for many years and has received several awards for his curatorial work. From 2013 to 2018, he was chairman of the Advisory Board for Visual Arts at the Goethe-Institut, and from February 2016 to March 2019, he was the director of the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen. Beitin has been the director of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg since 2019.

Friedrich von Borries is a professor of design theory at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK). He works at the intersection of urban development, architecture, design, and art. His work focuses on the relationship between design and social development. His motto is: “As a scientist, I try to understand the world. As a designer, I try to change it.”

Nikita Dhawan is a professor of Political Theory and the History of Political Thought at the TU Dresden. She studied philosophy and German studies at the University of Mumbai and gender studies at the Research Centre for Women’s Studies at SNDT Women’s University Mumbai, India. In 2006, she graduated with a doctorate in philosophy from Ruhr University Bochum. From 2008 to 2014, she held a junior professorship in political science with a focus on gender and postcolonial studies at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. In 2017, she received the Käthe Leichter Prize for her research in Women’s and gender studies, as well as for her work in promoting the Women’s movement and her contributions to gender equality. From 2018 to 2021, Nikita Dhawan held the chair of political science with a focus on gender studies at Justus Liebig University Gießen.

Lisa Garforth teaches sociology at Newcastle University in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her research explores alternative sustainable societies, combining the analysis of speculative literature with insights from social theory and utopian studies. In her monograph Green Utopias (2017), she examines ecological utopias in literature, sustainability politics, and ecopolitics in the second half of the twentieth century. Her most recent research focuses theoretically and empirically on how readers engage with climate science and the future of the climate through speculative fiction. A coauthored book on this topic, Reading Science / Fiction: Practices, Pleasure and Publics, has recently been published.

Andreas Greiner lives and works in Berlin, Germany. After studying medicine, anatomy, and art in the Institute for Spatial Experiments (Institut für Raumexperimente), Greiner has devised a practice that encompasses time-based, living and digital sculptures, photographs, and video, with a concentration on the influence of anthropogenic interventions on the form and evolution of “nature.” Incorporating artificial intelligence, living organisms such as algae, flies, and chickens, genetically modified cells, and at-risk ecosystems, Greiner’s art effects a shift of perspective in which the classical divisions between nature and culture, between human and non-human are undone. Not unlike setups for scientific experiments, his works examine man’s impact on the biological and atmospheric processes of our planet. Greiner has exhibited his work at the Mönchehaus Museum Goslar as the 34th recipient of the Kaiserring emerging-artist award, and Berlinische Galerie, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Centre Pompidou, among many others.

Folke Köbberling is an artist and professor at the Institute for Architecture-Related Art at Technical University, Braunschweig, Germany. She studied art at the Kassel School of Art and architecture at the University of the Arts in Berlin and held teaching appointments, among others, in Berlin, Vienna, London, Los Angeles, and Vancouver. Since 2014 she has been realizing solo and collaborative projects. Her work includes permanent and temporary installations as well as performances, in which the relation between humans and the built environment plays a crucial role. In the last years with moving to the countryside the role of natural materials like row wool and earth are appearing in her work. 

Veronika Mehlhart is a junior curator at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. She studied in the Art – Media – Aesthetic Education program at the University of Bremen and art studies at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK). From 2023 to 2025, she was a curatorial assistant at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, where she worked on various exhibitions, including Kapwani Kiwanga: The Length of the Horizon, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas: An Alternative Story and Utopia: The Right to Hope. She curated the group exhibition Cleaving the wind into fragments: Braunschweig Projects 2022–23 at the HBK in 2023 as well as the monographic exhibition Iryna Vorona. In the Face of War at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2025.

Sebastian Mühl is an art historian and curator. He is a research fellow in the Research Focus Aesthetics at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and a member of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga. Mühl studied philosophy and fine arts in Munich and Leipzig, receiving his doctorate from the Offenbach University of Art and Design. He was a digital curator at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. His monograph Utopien der Gegenwartskunst: Geschichte und Kritik des utopischen Denkens in der Kunst nach 1989 was published in 2020. His current work focuses on aesthetics, political theory, utopia and propaganda studies, and art in Eastern Europe.

Marina Naprushkina is an artist, feminist, and activist. Her diverse artistic practice includes video, performance, drawing, installation, and text. In 2007, she founded the Office for Anti Propaganda, which critically questions the power structures inherent in nation-states. In 2013, Naprushkina cofounded the initiative Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit, which aims to create a strong community of people with and without migration and asylum backgrounds, and serves as a commons space based on migrant self-organization, where art has become a key means of communication. Naprushkina received the ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture (2017) and the Sussmann Artist Award (2015).

After graduating from RWTH Aachen University in 1995, architect and urban planner Ina-Marie Orawiec founded OX2architekten together with her partner Marcin Orawiec. OX2gether then followed in 2005. In the transit system she developed, cooperative networks conceptualize participation processes, as well as art and cultural events, which are curated through transformation in urban development, the construction industry, connectivity, and mobility. Since 2008, she has been the sole managing director of OX2architekten GmbH, the architecture, urban planning and communication company she established. From 2007 to 2014, she lectured in urban planning and development at the Real Estate Management Institute (REMI) at EBS, the University of Economics and Law in Wiesbaden. 

Tomás Saraceno is an Argentina-born, Berlin-based artist whose projects devise platforms for ecosocial, participatory, and installative encounters, that host and amplify regenerative forms of knowledge. Connecting across scales and spectra, his work builds bridges of “response-ability” that seek to move audiences towards deeper reciprocity and attunement with other beings in the web(s) of life. For over two decades, Saraceno has led open, multi-access, collective projects that overcome lines of discipline, border, and species, expanding on his research into moving beyond arachnophobia and the Capitalocene, towards eco-social justice. 

Ludger Schwarte is a professor of philosophy at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. He studied philosophy, literature, and political science in Münster, Berlin, and Paris. He earned his doctorate and habilitation in philosophy from the Free University of Berlin. Schwarte was an assistant professor at the University of Basel and a professor of aesthetic theory at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Schwarte has held research fellowships and guest lectureships in Abidjan, New York, Paris, Washington, DC, and Weimar. His work focuses on aesthetics, political philosophy, cultural philosophy, and the history of science. His publications include Gene – Mären (1998), Die Regeln der Intuition: Kunstphilosophie nach Adorno, Heidegger und Wittgenstein (2000), Philosophie der Architektur (2009), Vom Urteilen (2012),Pikturale Evidenz: Zur Wahrheitsfähigkeit des Bildes (2015), and Notate für eine künftige Kunst (2016), Qualitäten der Freiheit. Demokratie für Übermorgen (2024).

Dino Steinhof studied fine arts at the University of Fine Arts Münster and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He completed his studies with a postgraduate master’s degree in Art in Context at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). From 2021 to 2022, he completed a research internship at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, working as a curatorial assistant on exhibitions including True Pictures? LaToya Ruby Frazier, Empowerment, and Kapwani Kiwanga: The Length of the Horizon. Since 2023, Steinhof has been the curatorial assistant to the director of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. He also curated the solo exhibition PaoloPellegrin: Fragile Wonders (2023). Together with Andreas Beitin, Steinhof cocurated the monographic exhibition Leandro Erlich: Weightless (2024) as well as the thematic group exhibition Utopia: The Right to Hope.

Tilo Wesche is a professor of practical philosophy at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. His recent publications include Die Rechte der Natur: Vom nachhaltigen Eigentum (2023) and Einführung in die Theorien des Eigentums (2024, with Niklas Angebauer).