Upcoming Matinees
Through five exhibitions a year, the artistic director and board of directors, working on a volunteer basis, provide opportunities for their members and all citizens interested in art. The goal of all these initiatives is to show new paths, open eyes, and awaken sensitivity—especially in a noisy and superficial world. In addition to established figures in the contemporary art scene, young artists are regularly invited to present their work to the public. Art in discussion is a school for tolerance. Readings, musical events, and themed evenings expand the Kunstverein Oerlinghausen’s sophisticated program.
01.03.–26.04.2026
Exhibition
Veit Mette
Certainties
With this exhibition, the Kunstverein presents new works by Bielefeld photographer Veit Mette (born 1961). His documentary images are snapshots that form a photographic biography of a city: Bielefeld. They reveal and artistically capture what would otherwise be lost in the flow of time. They show the people of this city who they were and who they have become. Whether in his large-format images in the central hall of the Bielefeld University, his photographs of people from Bethel who have been travelling through Bielefeld on a light rail train for a quarter of a century, or in Mette’s numerous other art projects, their presence in the city is always based on the desire to bring art into people’s everyday lives.
With the social upheavals – be they problems of advancing urbanisation, the ecological crisis or radical political upheavals – we have all lost our old certainties. Like a seismograph, Veit Mette’s art has changed and taken on the form of a search that oscillates between the no longer and the not yet unknown. With the help of multiple exposures, he sets image worlds in motion that artistically express the blurred and uncertain nature of this search. The boundary between photography, graphic representation and painting is deliberately crossed, representing an attempt to make the search for new certainties a general, shared endeavour.
17.05.–12.07.2026
Exhibition
Bruno Raetsch
Friends
Bruno Raetsch, born in Neuss in 1962 and raised in Potsdam, is a professor of sculpture/figure at Burg Giebichenstein, the Art University in Halle (Saale), and head of the class of the same name. He represents an art movement that confidently abandons the traditional concept of sculpture, in which a craftsman “carves an image out of stone or wood” Bruno Raetsch is completely independent artistically, free from conventions and capable of giving plastic form to moods, feelings, thoughts and memories – in three-dimensional drawings of possibly real and imaginable soulscapes, surrealistic and often socially critical wooden sculptures, through expansive three-dimensional installations and through sculptures made of clay, concrete and other materials, from which he also casts bronze sculptures. “There is an incredibly concentrated raw energy in his paintings and sculptures – like oak trees in a headwind,” writes London-based Swiss artist Hans Stofe about Bruno Raetsch’s art: “This energy spreads across the surfaces to the edges of the objects or images, where it solidifies into encrusted, dark, shadow-like figures. The paintings become sculptural, the sculptures become painterly” – and the art seems alive.
31.05.2026, 11.30 am
Talk
Prof. Claudia Rohrmoser
Art, Digital Media and AI
Prof. Claudia Rohrmoser, born in Salzburg in 1977, teaches Motion Design and Media Scenography at the Faculty of Art and Design at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSBI). In 2019, she founded the Digital Media and Experiment programme, which has since established itself as a pioneering creative flagship for HSBI. In addition to her teaching activities, she works as a media artist in theatre, concert and institutional contexts of electronic art. Her works move in the borderline and interstitial space between film, music and stage. In a critical examination of the different temporalities of human perception and ecological transformation processes, she develops spatial image productions that make moving images tangible as expanded cinema, audiovisual concert performances or location-based projection mapping. Her works have been shown internationally, including at the Mutek Festival Tokyo, Stanford University, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, the Salzburg Easter Festival, Ars Electronica and Theater Bielefeld. She studied multimedia art with a degree in computer animation at the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg, media art with Prof. Maria Vedder and narrative film with Prof. Jutta Brückner at the Berlin University of the Arts. She is currently conducting research on the spatial and physical effects of immersive media art as part of a PhD programme in artistic research at the Mozarteum University Salzburg.
14.06.2026, 11.30 am
Concert
MA NAVU
Concert
18.07.2026, 11.30 am
Event
Summer festival at the Kunstverein
A ceremony featuring a special talk, a band, food and beverages
31.08.–12.10.2026
Exhibition
Beate Haupt
Encounter with Moses
For her exhibition in the Old Synagogue, Beate Haupt, an artist who lives and works in Braunschweig and was born in Wolfenbüttel in 1966, has created a series of works entitled Encounter with Moses. It developed from an image that had been in her mind for years and that had originated while swimming in the Mediterranean: a young man with long hair standing in water. A slight chest blurred the clear attribution to gender. A modern man, yet as if from an old painting, glistening, enveloped in the pale light purple of the water. She wants to show this man, a Moses of today, strong and weak at the same time, struggling with the water, looking around fearfully, striding proudly into the floods, blowing the water away, swimming, drifting. Beate Haupt deliberately leaves no room for the biblical story of parting the waters and walking through them. She wants to show a more everyday story – as it happens today, all over the world.
27.09.2026, 11.30 am
Talk
Christina Végh
Art societies and contemporary art
04.10.2026, 11.30 am
Concert
Jenny Meyer
concert with harp
Autumn 2026
Book Presentation
Jürgen Hartmann, Isolde Müller-Borchert and Prof. Dr Andreas Beaugrand
A New History of the Jews in Oerlinghausen
This publication focuses on the various synagogues of Oerlinghausen. Through an examination of their origins, architectural changes and use, it tells the story of a place where Jewish life was a visible part of the community for some 250 years – both in everyday life and in the townscape. The book is based on newly uncovered archival sources, including previously little-examined community accounts and administrative records. These enable the history of the synagogues in Oerlinghausen since the 18th century to be traced in a largely coherent manner for the first time.
The focus is on the various synagogues: early prayer rooms in private or rented premises from the mid-18th century onwards, followed by two modest buildings, and finally the imposing new building from the late 19th century on Tönsbergstraße. These synagogues also tell the story of the development of the local Jewish community. They reveal internal Jewish conflicts, religious orientations and social changes.
Furthermore, the publication examines the context in which these synagogues were built and existed. Issues of integration and exclusion, rising anti-Semitism and government regulations had a direct impact on their history. Ultimately, the key question is why this synagogue – unlike many others – largely survived the Nazi era structurally and has been preserved to this day as a testament to Oerlinghausen’s Jewish history.
08.11.–20.12.2026
Exhibition
Daniel Wagenblast
Man and Space
Daniel Wagenblast, born in Schwäbisch Gmünd in 1963, is a master craftsman when it comes to working with wood. Since studying at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, his theme has been humanity in relation to the world – be it pistols, animals, the globe, a car or a church, a tank, a house, a man or a woman. All these actors in Wagenblast’s sculptures tell stories of shifts in scale and wondrous relationships between the world and people and their things: humans as seekers, watchers, dreamers on the brink of the abyss, or heroes conquering the world. A complex world, an entire cosmos, is created with simple means. His figures are rather prototypical and, not unusually, based on the artist himself. The deliberately rough surface takes away much of any illusionistic impression – it is the artist’s reality that we encounter in the works, which, at a distance from the reality we perceive, immediately becomes the truth.
22.11.2026, 11.30 am
Performance
Anna Bella Eschengerd
Settled in
01.03.–26.04.2026
Exhibition
Veit Mette
Certainties
With this exhibition, the Kunstverein presents new works by Bielefeld photographer Veit Mette (born 1961). His documentary images are snapshots that form a photographic biography of a city: Bielefeld. They reveal and artistically capture what would otherwise be lost in the flow of time. They show the people of this city who they were and who they have become. Whether in his large-format images in the central hall of the Bielefeld University, his photographs of people from Bethel who have been travelling through Bielefeld on a light rail train for a quarter of a century, or in Mette’s numerous other art projects, their presence in the city is always based on the desire to bring art into people’s everyday lives.
With the social upheavals – be they problems of advancing urbanisation, the ecological crisis or radical political upheavals – we have all lost our old certainties. Like a seismograph, Veit Mette’s art has changed and taken on the form of a search that oscillates between the no longer and the not yet unknown. With the help of multiple exposures, he sets image worlds in motion that artistically express the blurred and uncertain nature of this search. The boundary between photography, graphic representation and painting is deliberately crossed, representing an attempt to make the search for new certainties a general, shared endeavour.
17.05.–12.07.2026
Exhibition
Bruno Raetsch
Friends
Bruno Raetsch, born in Neuss in 1962 and raised in Potsdam, is a professor of sculpture/figure at Burg Giebichenstein, the Art University in Halle (Saale), and head of the class of the same name. He represents an art movement that confidently abandons the traditional concept of sculpture, in which a craftsman “carves an image out of stone or wood” Bruno Raetsch is completely independent artistically, free from conventions and capable of giving plastic form to moods, feelings, thoughts and memories – in three-dimensional drawings of possibly real and imaginable soulscapes, surrealistic and often socially critical wooden sculptures, through expansive three-dimensional installations and through sculptures made of clay, concrete and other materials, from which he also casts bronze sculptures. “There is an incredibly concentrated raw energy in his paintings and sculptures – like oak trees in a headwind,” writes London-based Swiss artist Hans Stofe about Bruno Raetsch’s art: “This energy spreads across the surfaces to the edges of the objects or images, where it solidifies into encrusted, dark, shadow-like figures. The paintings become sculptural, the sculptures become painterly” – and the art seems alive.
31.05.2026, 11.30 am
Talk
Prof. Claudia Rohrmoser
Art, Digital Media and AI
Prof. Claudia Rohrmoser, born in Salzburg in 1977, teaches Motion Design and Media Scenography at the Faculty of Art and Design at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSBI). In 2019, she founded the Digital Media and Experiment programme, which has since established itself as a pioneering creative flagship for HSBI. In addition to her teaching activities, she works as a media artist in theatre, concert and institutional contexts of electronic art. Her works move in the borderline and interstitial space between film, music and stage. In a critical examination of the different temporalities of human perception and ecological transformation processes, she develops spatial image productions that make moving images tangible as expanded cinema, audiovisual concert performances or location-based projection mapping. Her works have been shown internationally, including at the Mutek Festival Tokyo, Stanford University, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, the Salzburg Easter Festival, Ars Electronica and Theater Bielefeld. She studied multimedia art with a degree in computer animation at the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg, media art with Prof. Maria Vedder and narrative film with Prof. Jutta Brückner at the Berlin University of the Arts. She is currently conducting research on the spatial and physical effects of immersive media art as part of a PhD programme in artistic research at the Mozarteum University Salzburg.
14.06.2026, 11.30 am
Concert
MA NAVU
Concert
18.07.2026, 11.30 am
Event
Summer festival at the Kunstverein
A ceremony featuring a special talk, a band, food and beverages
31.08.–12.10.2026
Exhibition
Beate Haupt
Encounter with Moses
For her exhibition in the Old Synagogue, Beate Haupt, an artist who lives and works in Braunschweig and was born in Wolfenbüttel in 1966, has created a series of works entitled Encounter with Moses. It developed from an image that had been in her mind for years and that had originated while swimming in the Mediterranean: a young man with long hair standing in water. A slight chest blurred the clear attribution to gender. A modern man, yet as if from an old painting, glistening, enveloped in the pale light purple of the water. She wants to show this man, a Moses of today, strong and weak at the same time, struggling with the water, looking around fearfully, striding proudly into the floods, blowing the water away, swimming, drifting. Beate Haupt deliberately leaves no room for the biblical story of parting the waters and walking through them. She wants to show a more everyday story – as it happens today, all over the world.
27.09.2026, 11.30 am
Talk
Christina Végh
Art societies and contemporary art
04.10.2026, 11.30 am
Concert
Jenny Meyer
concert with harp
Autumn 2026
Book Presentation
Jürgen Hartmann, Isolde Müller-Borchert and Prof. Dr Andreas Beaugrand
A New History of the Jews in Oerlinghausen
This publication focuses on the various synagogues of Oerlinghausen. Through an examination of their origins, architectural changes and use, it tells the story of a place where Jewish life was a visible part of the community for some 250 years – both in everyday life and in the townscape. The book is based on newly uncovered archival sources, including previously little-examined community accounts and administrative records. These enable the history of the synagogues in Oerlinghausen since the 18th century to be traced in a largely coherent manner for the first time.
The focus is on the various synagogues: early prayer rooms in private or rented premises from the mid-18th century onwards, followed by two modest buildings, and finally the imposing new building from the late 19th century on Tönsbergstraße. These synagogues also tell the story of the development of the local Jewish community. They reveal internal Jewish conflicts, religious orientations and social changes.
Furthermore, the publication examines the context in which these synagogues were built and existed. Issues of integration and exclusion, rising anti-Semitism and government regulations had a direct impact on their history. Ultimately, the key question is why this synagogue – unlike many others – largely survived the Nazi era structurally and has been preserved to this day as a testament to Oerlinghausen’s Jewish history.
08.11.–20.12.2026
Exhibition
Daniel Wagenblast
Man and Space
Daniel Wagenblast, born in Schwäbisch Gmünd in 1963, is a master craftsman when it comes to working with wood. Since studying at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, his theme has been humanity in relation to the world – be it pistols, animals, the globe, a car or a church, a tank, a house, a man or a woman. All these actors in Wagenblast’s sculptures tell stories of shifts in scale and wondrous relationships between the world and people and their things: humans as seekers, watchers, dreamers on the brink of the abyss, or heroes conquering the world. A complex world, an entire cosmos, is created with simple means. His figures are rather prototypical and, not unusually, based on the artist himself. The deliberately rough surface takes away much of any illusionistic impression – it is the artist’s reality that we encounter in the works, which, at a distance from the reality we perceive, immediately becomes the truth.
