INVENTORY 1995–2025

Halle für Kunst Lüneburg is turning 30. To conclude its anniversary programme, Samuel Bich’s solo exhibition combines archival research, artistic practice and institutional critique. Based on a comprehensive inventory, the artist initiates a series of interventions that question the conditions of production and presentation of contemporary art. In this way, he makes the temporal, spatial, material and personal resources of the Kunstverein visible. The artist approached Halle für Kunst Lüneburg via ist archival holdings. With his work "Archiv / Archive" (2025), Samuel Bich assigns the institution’s history a permanent space and a sustainable organisational structure that remain in place beyond the duration of the exhibition. To this end, he installed a shelving and lighting system in which documents are not only stored but also made accessible and usable as source material. By tracing connections as well as gaps, Bich opens up new perspectives within and beyond the archive. In the course of his archival research, continuities in the history of Halle für Kunst Lüneburg as well as connections between the institution and the artist came to light. Bich exposes these coincidental and yet momentous links in plexiglass-framed works that juxtapose photographic reproductions of archival documents with official communications he himself received during his artistic career. While "Absagen: Stipendium im Bereich Bildende Kunst (B. Milla) und Gute Vorlage (H. Munder)" (2025) reveals relational parallels between individual and institutional biographies, "Absagen: Kataloge für junge Künstler*innen" (2025) refers to temporal overlaps within the history of the association. In this way, Bich addresses structural dependencies that exist between artists, institutions and funding bodies and that continue to shape and condition cultural work today. Furthermore, by placing the work "To Show is to Preserve (2008, 2025)" (2025) in the storage room of the association, the exhibition opens up a spatial relation that would otherwise remain hidden from the public. For Samuel Bich, not only the exhibition space but also all other rooms of the Kunstverein are potential work and exhibition areas—including the kitchen, archive, utility room and storage room. He therefore commissioned the photographer Fred Dott, who has been documenting the exhibitions for decades, to produce the first-ever record of all premises of Halle für Kunst Lüneburg in an empty state. The spatial overview is collated and annotated in the three-part plexi-framed work "Raumansichten, Grund- & Aufriss / Views, Floorplan & Elevation (pdf)" (2025). As the title suggests, the overview is also made available as a PDF file to the association as reference material for the preparation of future projects. The photographic documentation thus fulfils a dual function: archiving the spatial conditions and providing a working basis for cultural production. In a similar vein, the edition "30 Stühle / 30 Chairs" (2025) responds to the basic facilities of the institution. Its three decade-long history is translated in a form that is both symbolic and concrete: thirty folding chairs correspond with the Kunstverein’s years of existence and at the same time address a practical gap—the lack of suitable seating at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg. With the exhibition, the edition becomes part of the association’s inventory. Through his investigations and interventions, Bich himself becomes part of the institutional history and archival holdings of Halle für Kunst Lüneburg. Accompanying the exhibition is a publication that provides an overview of its entire inventory. Dimensions, materials and contents have been meticulously recorded and catalogued by the artist. Thus, exhibition and publication reflect and complement each other, emptying the association’s premises on the one hand and filling them with texts, images, memories and stories on the other. Samuel Bich’s solo exhibition exposes Halle für Kunst Lüneburg as an institutional shell that is only filled with content and life thanks to artistic practice. The exhibited works draw attention to the passing of time, the construction of memory and shifts in perception. Thus, INVENTORY 1995-2025 is more than an anniversary project: it proposes a sustainable model for how archives may be understood as living, open spaces and put to use for future artistic production and presentation.