At the opening of the 2025/26 academic year on October 15, 2025 at HFBK Hamburg, President Martin Köttering welcomes the 230 newly enrolled students who have been selected from 2,291 applications for the Bachelor’s and Master’s programs in Fine Arts and for the teaching degree in Art.

The welcome will be followed by a guest lecture entitled Captive Contagions: How We Cope With Epidemics in the Modern Era by science historian Dr. Edna Bonhomme, which will kick off the State of Health symposium as part of the PhD program the following day.

The five new professors appointed to the HFBK Hamburg are introduced below: The university is delighted to welcome Cyprien Gaillard to enrich its teaching in the field of sculpture, Anne Femmer and Anne Duk Hee Jordan to the design program, and Dane Komljen for film and Jasmin Werner for sculpture and stage design to the fundamentals program.

About the new HFBK professors:

Anne Femmer is an architect who continuously explores the professional boundaries of the discipline of architecture in her work by incorporating alternative practices of process-oriented design, construction, and use of built environments. Her collaboratively developed buildings and designs are exploratory investigations into broad issues: from the use of materials in the tension between ecology and economy, to experimental (co-)living, to burning questions of form, design, and expression. She is particularly interested in immediate action: making. Her work has received numerous awards, including the Berlin Art Prize in the architecture section and the German Architecture Museum Prize in Frankfurt. In 2023, Anne Femmer co-curated the German Pavilion at the 18th Architecture Biennale in Venice. She has been teaching for more than ten years, most recently as a visiting professor at the Technical University of Munich (2019), Graz University of Technology (2020–2022), and the Berlin University of the Arts (2022–2025). Starting this winter semester, Anne Femmer will be Professor of Sustainable Practices at the HFBK Hamburg.

Cyprien Gaillard works with film, video, photography, collage, installation, and performance. His work addresses civilizational upheavals, geological time, and the “poetry of entropy” by rearranging history and thus making the present visible. Gaillard combines landscapes and architectures from different eras: his sculptural interventions range from the excavation of a bunker to objects made of shovels and onyx. Gaillard’s audiovisual language is reminiscent of Romanticism, but at the same time acts as a critique of colonialism, failed modernism, and capitalist dynamics. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in international art institutions, including Palais de Tokyo & Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2022), Fondation LUMA, Arles (2022), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2021), TANK Shanghai (2019), Accelerator Konsthall, Stockholm (2019), Museum Tinguely, Basel (2019), K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2016), Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2015), and MoMA PS1, New York (2013). In 2011, he was awarded the National Gallery Prize for Young Art, Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), and in 2010, the Prix Marcel Duchamp (Paris). Cyprien Gaillard takes over the professorship for sculpture at the HFBK Hamburg.

Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s artistic practice encompasses sculpture, robotics, installation, and narrative environments. Her works operate in the field of regenerative art, actively intervening in environmental processes and negotiating questions of technology, ecology, collective action, and transformation. Humor and poetic imagination are essential means of making connections between human and non-human life tangible. From 2023 to 2025, Duk Hee was Professor of Digital Media at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. Solo exhibitions have been held at Canal Projects, New York; Barbican Centre, London; Bass Museum, Miami; and Kunsthaus Wien, among others; group exhibitions have been held at ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Trondheim Art Museum; Gwangju Biennale; ACC Korea; and NYU Shanghai. In the winter semester of 2025/26, Duk Hee will take up the professorship for Environmental Practice at the HFBK Hamburg.

Dane Komljen’s work unfolds at the intersection of narrative, experimental, and essayistic cinema, exploring concepts of body, space, utopia, and community. It traces a movement: from the examination of specific architectural locations and the layering of personal and collective memories to the unfolding of utopian fictions inhabited by both real and staged communities. Komlien’s latest feature film, Desire Lines, premiered at the Festival del Film Locarno in 2025.⁠ ⁠His second feature film, Afterwater, won the Best Film Award at the Seville Film Festival. His short films Phantasiesätze and Our Body won the Fundación Casa Wabi Mantarraya Award in Locarno and the Prix UIP of the European Film Academy in Rotterdam, respectively. Komljen’s films have been screened at the Berlinale, Cinéma du Réel, FID Marseille, and the New York Film Festival, among others. Dane Komljen is taking over the basic professorship in film at the HFBK Hamburg.

Jasmin Werner’s sculptural-installative practice examines the material and ideological architectures of origin, belonging, and economic dependence—often in conjunction with collaborative processes that interweave research and craft practices. Her work has been presented internationally, for example in solo exhibitions at Damien & The Love Guru in Zurich and palace enterprise in Copenhagen (both 2025), at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster (2021), and at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2018). Group exhibitions have taken her to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2024), the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn (2022), and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea (2017), among others. Jasmin Werner was part of the Berlin Program for Artists in 2023, received a working scholarship in fine arts from the Berlin Senate in 2024, and spent residencies at the Goethe-Institut Manila, Art Hub Copenhagen, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, among others. Jasmin Werner has been appointed to the basic professorship in sculpture and stage design.