Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino - Seven Works

Kunstraum of the Leuphana University Lüneburg is pleased to announce Seven Works, a solo exhibition by Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino curated by Ana Druwe in collaboration with Halle für Kunst Lüneburg and Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society. The exhibition brings a set of works by Celestino in dialogue with the specific context of Kunstraum Leuphana Lüneburg. It highlights the interplay between the institution’s archive, the university campus, and its historical connection with Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, exploring potential porosity between the university and the city.

In Seven Works, Celestino explores agency and complicity within institutional systems. The selection of the seven score-based pieces taps into the surface of the space –architectural and organizational– with responsive, contingent negotiation to examine how familial ties, property regimes, and institutional procedures shape the terms of visibility, authorship, and access.

A public program is presented in collaboration with students of Leuphana Universität. As part of the seminar on Institutional Praxis, led by Susanne Leeb and Ana Druwe, the pedagogical program examines how communities and institutions negotiate shared spaces through notions of porosity. Along the semester, Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino has contributed to the seminar with practice-based exercises that speculate on futures, rethinking institutional gestures, and reimagining the organization of the university campus. 

Their lecture From Language (23 Apr, 2025) introduces linguistics as an operational force that structures contracts, performances, institutions, and forms of refusal. In the Descriptions II workshop (24 Apr, 2025), the artist invites the students to consider the political aspect of grammatologically elucidating an object within a given context. During the exhibition period, the students and Leuphana community are invited to contribute with interventions and other speculations on institutionalities, having the campus as materiality for new forms of operation and transaction. 

Opening hours –  Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 12 to 4pm.

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino (Brazil, 1989) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Through score, sculpture, text, photography, sound, and video, the artist addresses the remaining structures of the transatlantic colonial project, focusing on institutional critique, language, and objecthood. Celestino was awarded the ars viva 2025, Pampulha Grant 2024, and the Ducato Prize 2023, amongst other prizes, grants, and residencies.

Ana Druwe is currently a fellow at Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society. Her work pursues a critically reflective institutional practice. At Casa do Povo, a renowned cultural center in São Paulo, she creates collaborative projects that understand communication as a tool for participation and active co-creation of artistic spaces. She develops collective editorial formats, such as the magazine Nossa Voz, and promotes new forms of storytelling as a political-emancipatory tool to promote self-representation and knowledge transfer.

Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg is an organization dedicated to reconfiguring institutional critique as a proliferating form of institutional practice with exhibitions, lectures, workshops, conferences, film screenings, and performances. The Kunstraum allows students to work with artists and curators, develop exhibitions, encounter artistic practices, and deal with current questions of contemporary art. Founded in 1993, it has collaborated with artists such as Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Park McArthur, and Christian Boltanski, as well as curators such as Marion von Osten, Ruth Noack, Roger Buergel, Joshua Simon, Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, to name a few, each of whom collaborated to profile the Kunstraum as an experimental teaching and exhibition space.

Halle für Kunst Lüneburg was founded in 1995 by a group of students from Leuphana University. As a Kunstverein, it is relational in nature and relies on the engagement of its members to sustain an institutional rhythm. Interweaving solo and group exhibitions, mediation and education activities, publishing and research projects, the program is dedicated to emerging artists and underrepresented cultural practices. In 2020, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg was honored with the ADKV-ART COLOGNE Prize for Kunstvereine. 2025 marks the art association’s 30th anniversary, an occasion on which it sheds light on the administrative processes, support structures, and relational fabrics that have shaped its programs and publics.

The Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg is a research institute that contributes to developing and internationalizing the university’s main research priorities. Driven by an international fellowship program, it meets the challenges of a globalized present in a research-based way. Located in the university’s central building, designed by Daniel Libeskind, LIAS’s approach is characterized by interdisciplinary collaboration, university engagement, and co-creation.

Curated by Ana Druwe in cooperation with Kunstraum Leuphana Lüneburg, Leuphana University for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg. Production, Communication and Research by Jana Paim Costa and Litha Rosenfeld (Kunstraum Leuphana Lüneburg). Special thanks to Maria Sophie Dorsch and Lisa Deml (Halle für Kunst Lüneburg), Ulf Wuggenig, Susanne Leeb and Sabrina Bollhof.