Under the direction of Prof. Dr. Julia Gelshorn and Kathrin Bentele, the seminar explores how artistic practices have responded to the changing relationships between humans, the environment, technology, and matter since the 1960s. The topic will be approached through the lens of Guillaume Dénervaud’s (b. 1987 in Fribourg, CH, lives in Paris, FR) solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg, opening in December 2026. Together with the students, a reader accompanying the exhibition will be published, introducing the core concepts of discourses around the “ecologization of art.”

In recent years, Guillaume Dénervaud has developed an artistic practice encompassing painting, drawing, and installation, which critically examines the relationship between nature, culture, and industry and explores the complex networks of relations between organic and inorganic, human and non-human matter. The seminar extends this perspective to include selected artistic and theoretical positions from the post-war period onwards (including Octavia Butler, TJ Demos, Donna Haraway, Tetsumi Kudo, Bruno Latour, Ursula K. Le Guin, Pamela M. Lee, Reza Negarestani, Robert Smithson, Anna Tsing Lowenhaupt, as well as exhibitions such as Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere (2022, MIT List Visual Arts Center), Critical Zones (2020, ZKM – Center for Art and Media) and Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009 (2009, Barbican Art Gallery), which understand ecology as an engagement with the environment in an expanded sense.

The seminar examines what aesthetic forms emerge in response to changing ecological conditions, and how artistic works do not merely represent these new entanglements but actively bring them into being as material and epistemic practices.