Coumba Samba’s “deutschland” puts logistics and supply chains under the microscope at Kunstverein in Hamburg. Fittingly staged in Germany’s major shipping hub, the American artist fills the darkened gallery with colourful shipping container-like structures and strobing lights, simultaneously localizing maritime flows of goods and capital and evoking a nocturnal port. Visitors navigate “a disorienting intimate experience of globalization’s distorting abstraction,” writes curator Milan Ther.

Bundling a sci-fi opera and music project into a solo show, Lila-Zoé Krauß’s “[After her Destruction]” opens at Kunsthaus Hamburg. The narrative of the Australian artist’s titular transmedia project centres on a protagonist, Girl, whose dialogue with a computer program blurs digital and dream worlds, questioning “notions of otherness, femininity and subjectivity.” On-site, the project manifests through video installations, and an accompanying album is available online on SoundCloud.

Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s installation, The Ephemeral Lake (2024), premieres at Hamburger Kunsthalle, reinterpreting the landscapes of 18th century Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich as immersive, computer-simulated ecologies. The piece explores themes of water, deep time, and crystallization, Steensen says, and “goes beyond contrasting the human figure in the environment.” Instead, it invites a worldview “where our bodies and minds merge with environmental energies and other species.”

The “Unleashed” edition of panke.gallery’s recent AR group exhibition, “Animal()City,” pops up at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37c3) in Hamburg (DE), releasing CGI creatures by Joachim Blank (image: The restless lion/ess, 2023), Eva Davidova, Meredith Drum, exonemo, Jonas Lund, Sahej Rahal, and Ingeborg Wie Henriksen. The show, curated by panke’s Sakrowski, draws inspiration from the ghostly presence of urban critters that, like people being siloed by online platforms and AI, seem to live in parallel worlds.

“DATA STREAMING,” featuring late Luxembourgish artist Michel Majerus, opens at Kunstverein in Hamburg. Lost to a 2002 plane crash, Majerus made waves in the dotcom era for playfully integrating digital images—videogames, animation, desktop publishing—into his paintings. Now, a major retrospective sees Kunstverein and 12 German museums mounting exhibitions reviewing the artist’s work “with the hindsight of artistic and technological developments of the past twenty years.”

In celebration of the 5th anniversary of Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, a Studio Drift survey opens at the local MK&G museum. “Moments of Connection” is the Dutch art and architecture duo’s most expansive exhibition in Germany to date and includes Drift classics such as Fragile Future III (2005, image), Shylight (2006), and In 20 Steps (2015). A new commission, Breaking Waves, is set to premiere in April, illuminating the facade of the iconic opera house with a drone choreography.