Newly published in Open Access: “Exhibition Ecologies” (De Gruyter, 2026)

The volume “Exhibition Ecologies. Entanglements of Art, Institutions, and Politics in the Environmental Crisis”, edited by Regine Ehleiter, a research assistant at the Chair of Digital Arts and Cultural Communication at the University of Witten/Herdecke, and Friederike Schäfer, has been published by De Gruyter.

The volume explores how exhibitions respond to the challenges of the climate crisis and how ecological narratives intertwine with colonial continuities, extractivism, institutional interests and questions of legitimacy. Exhibitions are understood here as ‘ecological media’, which are themselves shaped by infrastructures, economies and power relations.

The contributions combine art-historical analyses with reflections drawn from curatorial practice. Drawing on case studies ranging from museum collection displays to contemporary biennials, the volume discusses sustainability, decolonial justice and institutional responsibility, as well as the risks of the co-optation of ecological concerns and the transformative potential of exhibition-making.

Regine Ehleiter / Friederike Schäfer (eds.): Exhibition Ecologies. Entanglements of Art, Institutions, and Politics in the Environmental Crisis, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2026.

• About the publication / Open-access e-book

Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Federal and State Strategy for Excellence in the context of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective’ – EXC 2020 – project number 390608380.

This publication was partly funded by the Open Access Publication Fund for Monographs and edited volumes at Freie Universität Berlin.