Mia Oberländer

Following the successful launch of the Mind the Gap exhibition series with a presentation of large-format architectural photographs by Niklas Goldbach, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe is now taking a completely different approach with the artist Mia Oberländer. Through dialogues with the Kunsthalle’s staff and visits to the museum’s various venues—some of which are currently undergoing renovation—the artist engages with the on-site atmosphere and explores the emotional impact of the collection’s relocation and refurbishment.

Perceived by many – both staff and visitors – as a form of uprooting, these changes also offer great potential: the opportunity to find one’s place in a new context. Mia Oberländer explores how the perception of the artworks and the way they are engaged with are changing. What it is like for staff to give guided tours of historical works in the unfamiliar halls of the ZKM Hall Building, where old masters’ paintings are surrounded by the soundscape of media art, where the reverberation of a roaring computer narrative echoes around Dürer’s Schmerzensmann. This charged repositioning holds exciting narratives for a contemporary visual history, situated between the reality of the museum in transition and the fiction of the comic artist. This could take the form of a narrative tour of the collection in which people, works and buildings come into contact on different levels – emotionally, art-historically and artistically, between reality and fiction.

Mia Oberländer (born in Ulm in 1995) has lived in Hamburg since 2015. In 2019, she completed a Bachelor’s degree in Illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She went on to study for a Master’s degree in Graphic Narrative. In 2021, she was awarded the Berthold Leibinger Foundation’s Comic Book Prize and a Youth Literature Prize in the ‘New Talents’ category for her bachelor’s thesis, Anna. The volume was published in the same year by the Swiss publisher Edition Moderne and has since been translated into five other languages. Her second graphic novel, Saloon (also published by Edition Moderne), is due to be released in autumn 2025.