PhD Defence Henrik Nieratschker
You are cordially invited to the public defense of the research project *0work*: Artistic Practice as a Site of Postwork Imagination by artist Henrik Nieratschker.
On December 2 at 11.00, Nieratschker will publicly present his artistic work for the doctoral examination committee in the exhibition WORK/FRAGMENTS: 0 at Paradise, The Hague. At 16.00 on the same day, Nieratschker will defend his dissertation in the Academy Building at Leiden University.
Taking his experience as a former logistics worker as a point of departure, Henrik Nieratschker’s research is concerned with the rapidly shifting conditions of work in the midst of technological, political, and economic crises. It engages with current and historical discussions on postwork in theory, art, and activism and asks what possibilities artistic practice offers for imagining alternatives to the capitalist wage relation.
In his written dissertation, Nieratschker develops an understanding of the critical conditions of work from the double-position of artist and worker and renegotiates existing imaginations of a postwork society with and through art. By closely examining his own artistic work, spanning media installations, experimental sound, performances, and science fiction writing, he demonstrates how artistic practice suspends boundaries between work and non-work and argues that artists inhabit a dissonant, yet politically generative, class location.
Rather than serving as a utopian blueprint for the future of work, the research presents artistic practice as a space where materials and knowledges are aesthetically and discursively set against each other, providing new grounds for imagining postwork conditions.
Public Defence Henrik Nieratschker
2 December 2026 at 11.00
Paradise
West Den Haag X Royal Academy of Art
Groenewegje 136, The Hague
2 December 2026 at 16.00
Great Auditorium
Academy Building at Leiden University
Rapenburg 73, Leiden
Exhibition WORK/FRAGMENTS: 0
2–3 December 2026
Opening Hours 11.00–16.00
Paradise
West Den Haag X Royal Academy of Art
Groenewegje 136, The Hague
This research project was developed and supervised between the Binational Artistic PhD program of the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany, and the PhDArts program at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University & the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, the Netherlands, in order to obtain a Joint PhD Degree.
Supervisors
- Prof. Dr. Andrea Sick, Professor Media, and Cultural History, and Theory, Hochschule für Künste Bremen.
- Prof. Dr. Janneke Wesseling, Professor Emeritus in Practice and Theory of Research in the Visual Arts, Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University.
- Prof. Dennis Paul, professor Interaktion und Media in Digital Media, Hochschule für Künste Bremen.
