The annual Summer Academy is a one-week interdisciplinary workshop led by experienced instructors from various fields of art, inviting participants to engage artistically with changing thematic focuses.
Registration at:
sommerakademie2026@libken.de
Costs and further information coming soon
When: August 31 – September 6, 2026, Public Presentation on September 5, 2026
Where: Libken e.V.
Ort Böckenberg 15 – 17
17268 Gerswalde
Libken Summer Academy No. 9 – 2026
The one-week, interdisciplinary Summer Academy in Libken is an invitation to live and work artistically together, detached from familiar environments and structures. Now in its ninth year, the Summer Academy takes place at the Libken artist residency, a GDR-era prefabricated building (“Plattenbau”) with extensive gardens located in the rural Uckermark region.
The theme of this year’s Summer Academy is
Collective Space and the SELF – an approach through the artistic practices of ceramics, photography, painting, performance, text, and dialogue.
How do we want to, and how can we, work and act artistically today in a time of cultural budget cuts, war, the climate crisis, and social polarization?
The Summer Academy at the Libken artist residency sees itself as a laboratory, a space for experimentation, and a collective site for thinking and working in the Uckermark—in the countryside of eastern Germany. It is situated in a region shaped by ruptures, reinterpretations, and contradictory social experiences.
Starting from this specific location, the Summer Academy asks questions about appropriation, responsibility, and restitution: What does it mean to approach a place artistically, to inhabit it temporarily, and to live and work together within it? What does it mean to test solidary forms of coexistence and labor in a “Plattenbau”?
At the center are questions about individuality and collectivity, artistic authorship, and shared practice. Does extensive research lead to a feeling of being a “foreign body,” a desire to settle into one’s own familiar bubble? Are we thrown back upon ourselves, or do we experience permeability? How much honesty, curiosity, and genuine interest are required so that an artistic process does not just emerge from a place, but gives back to it?
We want to explore Libken as a specific space of resonance: as a rural location in eastern Germany where history, the present, structural change, political tensions, and questions of belonging directly collide. It is precisely here that the question arises of how discourse is still possible today: How can we speak with one another controversially, endure differences, and still move toward each other—even when political viewpoints are vastly different?
The Summer Academy thus also connects to artistic and social debates currently being negotiated internationally, such as at this year’s Venice Biennale: questions of representation, witness, documentation, community, the experience of crisis, and the role of art in a fragile present.
At the same time, the gaze is deliberately shifted from large-scale international exhibition formats back to the concrete location: to Libken, to the Uckermark, to the everyday life of living together, and to the act of looking and listening closely.
Artistic-documentary work plays a special role here—not as a mere depiction of reality, but as an artistic practice of observing, collecting, questioning, and making visible. Between subjective perception and collective reality, new forms of artistic research and engagement emerge.
Diverse artistic approaches and connections between them are possible: ceramics, drawing, painting, photography, text, voice, performance, as well as experimental and documentary formats. Libken thus becomes an open workspace for artistic research and shared practice—an attempt to relate to one another and to test new forms of working, living, and storytelling outside of everyday structures and conditions.
We strive for a collective, egalitarian space in which we learn together and from one another, and where we can discuss our own work and the work of other participants in an appreciative manner.
The Summer Academy ends with a celebration and a public presentation on September 5, 2026: Libken’s expansive grounds and rooms offer a wide range of possibilities for different (presentation) formats that can be developed both collectively and individually.
Working together in Libken
Active participation in the organization and implementation of all joint activities and a willingness to engage in communal processes is the foundation of our collective life and work in Libken. Furthermore, we see the Libken Summer Academy as a moment for respectful and discrimination-sensitive interaction with one another and take a clear stand against any kind of exclusion, racism, and antisemitism.
Concept and Organization: Sophia Kesting in cooperation with Susanne Kim and Katharina Reinsbach
Sophia Kesting
Sophia Kesting is a visual artist, photographer, and educator working from a feminist-intersectional perspective. She is the mother of a daughter. In her artistic research, spatial installations, and long-term photographic projects, she uses the photographic image as a starting point—incorporating archival material, auto-fictional text, sound, and lecture performances—to address societal and social upheavals. Her work makes the interactions between past and present both visible and tangible.
Sophia Kesting studied photography at the Academy of Fine Arts (HGB) Leipzig, where she subsequently served as an artistic research assistant in the Photography and Media class until 2023. She is currently pursuing a PhD in the Arts at KU Leuven / LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. Her research focuses on the 1989 Peaceful Revolution, exploring practices of resistance and the impact of systemic change on our present and future within German and European contexts.
Sophia Kesting (born 1983 in Leipzig) is a visual artist, photographer, researcher, and educator living and working in Leipzig and Brussels.
She studied Visual Communication at HTW Berlin until 2010, followed by Fine Arts and Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts (HGB) Leipzig, supported by a scholarship from the Cusanuswerk.
In her work, she questions societal and social systems of order, making the ruptures and tensions between past, present, and future visible and perceptible.
Starting from the photographic image, she moves to the edges of the medium, integrating auto-fictional text, sound, archival material, and lecture performances into her artistic research, photographic-media installations, and long-term projects.
Since 2010, her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and off-spaces both nationally and internationally.
In 2023, she was awarded the bronze medal of the German Photobook Prize for “Rewriting the Photographic Image” and in 2024, she received a project grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds. In 2026, her collaborative work with Dana Lorenz “Asphalt, Steine, Scherben” was nominated for the Merck Photography Prize. Starting in October 2026, she will be a resident fellow of the Boghossian Foundation at Villa Empain in Brussels.
She taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig from 2018–2023 and currently teaches at the LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. In 2025/2026, she served as the interim professor for Ricarda Roggan at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart.
Since 2023, she has been a founding and board member of the national network “Un/learning art and design education e.V.”
www.sophiakesting.com
www.asphaltsteinescherben.com
www.unlearning-ev.cargo.site
Katharina Reinsbach
Katharina Reinsbach (born 1993 in Berlin) lives and works as an artist in Berlin. She studied Painting/Fine Arts at the Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin under Prof. Friederike Feldmann and Prof. Pia Linz, completing her degree as a master student (Meisterschülerin) under the latter in 2024.
Furthermore, she studied at Chelsea College of Arts in London and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, most recently at Cub_ism_Artspace, Shanghai; Galerie Parterre, Berlin; Schloss Genshagen Foundation; ZAK – Center for Contemporary Art; and the Brücke-Museum.
In 2022, she received the Mart Stam Scholarship/Deutschlandstipendium. In 2026, she was awarded the artistic grant for emerging talent from GSE gGmbH, as well as various project grants, including from the Mart Stam Society. Together with Rahel Goetsch, she received funding from the Hessische Kulturstiftung for the production of the artist book What day is it today?
Susanne Kim
Susanne Kim was born in Dresden, lived in Syria with her parents for a period, and traveled with them on “vacation” to Hungary shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall to flee to West Germany.
She returned to Leipzig for her studies, earning a degree in Journalism. She attended the European Film College in Denmark, participated in the Berlinale Talent Campus, and completed the Professional Media Master Class (PMMC) in Halle.
Her documentary films ZUSAMMENGEBACKEN (2003), WHITE BOX (2010), DIE BANDE (2011), TROCKENSCHWIMMEN (2016), and MEINE WUNDERKAMMERN (2021) have been screened at numerous festivals worldwide.
From January 2024 to February 2025, MEINE WUNDERKAMMERN was exhibited as a walk-through spatial and sound installation with virtual reality animations at the Museum of Contemporary Art (GfZK) Leipzig, accompanied by a film/VR educational program.
Susanne’s current film, BECOMING KIM, tells her personal German-Korean family history. She lives and works in Leipzig.
trockenschwimmen.de
meine-wunderkammern.de
GfZK – Meine Wunderkammern
Interview – DOK.fest München
