17/04/2026
Urban Mending Lab: Interim Exhibition & Public Program
Urban Mending Lab began its activities in January 2026. Over the course of four intensive months, the Lab has initiated a series of four workshops that have shaped its conceptual direction: Body Practice: Scar Tissues; Songs of Repair and Catastrophe; Mending and Reweaving of Clothes; and Urban Narratives.
Each workshop has fostered its own community, developing distinct practices and shared processes with participants. This interim exhibition offers a moment to open these processes to the public. The project deliberately foregrounds incompleteness, inviting visitors to engage with an open question: what kind of visual and performative language is possible today for addressing complex, often contradictory realities of the city which demands intervention of communities and repair?
The exhibition brings together both collective expressions emerging from the Lab and individual projects by participants. Most of works remain in progress, as a sketches for the future possible realization. We also make an exhibition premier of the project “Here – Now - Everyone” which was realized by many current participants of the Lab as a performative intervention in August 2025.
Over the course of a month, the exhibition will continuously evolve, activating the space through an extensive public program. This includes lectures, performances, screenings, discussions, open workshops, karaoke seminars, assemblies, and concert. The format reflects Hamburg’s vibrant culture of critical artistic exchange, where artistic practice intersects with social inquiry and collective experimentation.
Alongside participants of the Urban Mending Lab, the program also features invited collaborators — artists, researchers, and practitioners who share a commitment to exploring processes of repair, care, and transformation in contemporary urban life.
Urban Mending Lab positions itself as an open platform: a space for learning, making, and reweaving connections between bodies, materials, and narratives. We consider this interim exhibition marks as a public invitation to take part in shaping what comes next.
