Freiburg | ArtRegion: Basel - Oberrhein

Kunstverein Freiburg

Happy Place

Biennale für Freiburg 3

5. Juni – 27. Juli 2025

Biennale für Freiburg is a new platform for contemporary art in Freiburg. The event formats and artworks developed for the Biennale, created through close collaboration between local actors and invited artists, explicitly reference the city and activate it as a field of experimentation. Freiburg’s hidden stories are revealed, the unexpected is provoked, and moments of interchange and contact are made available. The Biennale’s multi-layered program presents contemporary art beyond institutional spaces, contextualizes local conditions in tension with global issues, and offers new perspectives on the city. The artistic director of the Biennale für Freiburg 3 is Lorena Juan.

Stretching across public spaces, cultural institutions, and artist-run venues, HAPPY PLACE brings together local and international artists who explore the complex interrelations between environment, mobility, leisure, and travel. Each exhibition site follows a distinct thematic focus, shedding light on specific facets of this broader subject.

Many of the works in HAPPY PLACE critically engage with the ideologies of leisure tourism, while at the same time proposing counter-models to dominant ways of thinking and acting. Within this framework, tourism becomes not only an object of critique, but a speculative site of possibility. Artistic positions respond by adopting distinctive forms of expression—employing humor, exaggeration, and satire to unsettle perspectives, rewrite dominant narratives, and imagine new futures. Within these constructed landscapes, moments of disruption and transgression emerge—alternative ways of narrating, moving through, and inhabiting space.

The third edition of the Biennale für Freiburg will be accompanied by a multi-layered supporting program aimed at deepening the content of the exhibition while opening up new perspectives on the interdependence of tourism, urban development, and global power structures. Performances, workshops, and discussion formats will raise questions around commercialization, exoticization, and belonging, while historical and contemporary narratives of tourism and travel will be critically questioned. The supporting program not only opens up modes of engagement with the exhibitions of the biennale but also expands the thematic debate to include additional facets. Through the participatory formats, the Biennale für Freiburg 3 pursues a process-orientated approach by inviting the public to take an active part in the discussion. In this way, the city not only becomes an exhibition venue, but also an object of investigation itself — a lively space for artistic reflection and social debate.

Artists: !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Cem A., Esvin Alarcón Lam, Irene de Andrés, Céline Baumann, Jonas Brinker, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Enar de Dios Rodríguez, Patricia Domínguez, Elisa Duca, Anna Ehrenstein, Elyla, Lena Marie Emrich, Agnes Essonti Luque, Irene Fernández Arcas, Inka & Niclas, Ida Kammerloch, Monika Emmanuelle Kazi, Cosima zu Knyphausen, Left Hand Rotation, Randa Maroufi, Caroline Mesquita, Noha Mokhtar, Isabel Motz, Claudia Pagès Rabal, Marie Popall und Louisa Raspé, Ghita Skali, Christina Sperling, Eve Tagny, Florian Thate, Helena Uambembe, Unofficial Hiking Society, Jasmin Werner, Daniela Zambrano Almidón, Karla Zipfel, etaïnn zwer.

Team: Lorena Juan (Artistic Director), Isabel Francos Hohmann (Assistant Curator), Dieu Thanh Hoang (Art Medietion & Outreach), Dr. Sascia Bailer (Head of Production & Exhibition Management), Pia Quast (Intern), Lana Eichenhofer (Intern)

The Kunstverein Freiburg is one of the venues of the exhibition.