Photo lecture / book presentation »BITTE LEBN – Urban Art & Subculture in Berlin, 2003–2021«
22.4.2026, 17:30 Uhr
Kunstverein Hannover
For almost two decades, artists and groups have been coming together under the Reclaim Your City (RYC) banner to organise collective exhibitions, mural painting initiatives, conferences and temporary occupations. A photo talk on utopian structures in urban spaces, the boundaries of artistic forms of action, and exchanges with collectives in Europe, Latin America and East Africa.
The Exhibition:
Under the Milky Way. Abstraction, Autonomy, and Post-Vandalist Tendencies in Contemporary Art
Kunstverein Hannover
28.3.2026–19.7.2026
Sophienstraße 2
30159 Hannover
»Group Exhibition | Curated by Larissa Kikol and Christoph Platz-Gallus
With Amos Angeles, Alexandre Bavard, Cäcilia Brown, Stephen Burke, Bus126, Brad Downey and Akim, Antwan Horfee, Hams Klemens, Klub7, Daniel Laufer, Mischa Leinkauf, Martina Morger, Moses and Taps, Christoph und Sebastian Mügge, Patrick Niemann, Rocco and His Brothers, Veli Silver, Mathias Weinfurter and Angst Yok.
The exhibition Under the Milky Way brings together protagonists and collectives whose artistic practices might be associated with speculative post-vandalist tendencies in contemporary art—grounded in resistance, self-empowerment, and autonomous abstraction. What began with forms of uprising in public space and unauthorized painting has evolved into a new artistic language spanning the canvas, urban materiality, and street-adjacent conceptual art.The exhibition presents a wide range of positions that map the heterogeneity within the scenes, yet they are all distinguished by their artistic independence beyond institutional—and in part, legal—structures. Some come from a background in graffiti writing, others from university studies in painting or sculpture, many from both. The art that emerges from these trajectories can be most aptly described by three terms: abstraction, autonomy, and—depending on one’s perspective—post-vandalism.
In such work one encounters raw ideas, political activism, irony, autonomous art, and approaches that are at once conceptual and anarchic. Often uninvited, an art of art takes shape—sometimes declaring political stances, at other times claiming the freedom to do precisely what one wishes to do. Here, the outdoors has become a school, the urban underworld an atelier, and an unbounded anti-authoritarianism challenges the influence of both the academy and the market.«
