Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen,

You probably saw the pictures of the fire in the Amazon less than a fortnight ago. We were all shocked, but the flood of information about it has already dried up. Last August alone, 26,000 fires broke out in the Amazon region. Many are still burning, but the news is now focussing on other crises. Art, however, follows a different time dimension. It enables a dialogue that may not provoke an immediate reaction, but lasting thoughts.

As a curator, I have twice had the opportunity to show works by Andreas Greiner. It is a great honour for me to be able to introduce Greiner's works because they have influenced my own work and my perception of ecology and technology. In Greiner's work, science and art are not contradictory. His work thus enables a different view of the most important social issues of our time.

The combination of art and science leads us to ontological and ethical questions. It is not only about form, but also about politics - but politics not as the administration of a city or a country, but as an overriding problem in which the participation of all is at stake. Art can also speak for those who have no audible voice in modern Western society. It is a field of experimentation for fundamental questions of the future.

Greiner's art can be seen as the voice of the voiceless: Microorganisms, insects, plants that share a biological system with us. Above all, it offers us an opportunity to rethink our attitude towards ‘our environment’, with a certain poetry that mobilises words, voices, images and living beings.

To explain it, I would like to take you on a double journey over the next ten minutes. On the one hand, with direct reference to society and, on the other, with reference to art. One part of the journey takes us into the not-too-distant future - our ecological and technological coexistence. The second part of the journey is directly related to Goslar. An excursus to the current Kaiserring winner Barbara Kruger and the artist Joseph Beuys allows us to understand the urgency of Greiner's work.

Two questions guide us: How can we talk about the environment and ecology in times of climate change and species extinction? And above all, how can we deal with them artistically?

These questions are posed within the exhibition or at least thematised through the works and their relationships to one another. Our journey in this building could therefore lead from the upper floor to the ground floor.

On the upper floor, we are confronted with the much-debated question of transhumanism.

In addition to medical research in a world obsessed with self-optimisation and omnipotence, the core of transhumanism lies in the possibility of modifying body parts, but also in the selection and construction of genetic cells. A kind of superhuman becomes possible.

Greiner's interest in the natural sciences, which was already evident during his time as a medical student, fuelled his interest in all living things. If progress in genetic research means promoting the recovery and well-being of patients, then it also allows for the physical and genetic improvement of humans.

In this sense, it is an expression of the dream of the artificial human being. One of the best-known examples - 200 years after Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein - is the American biochemist Craig Venter. By duplicating the DNA of a bacterium, he opened the door to the artificial creation of new living beings. Greiner filmed these genetically modified cells with a scanning electron microscope.

As the embodiment of transhumanism, these cells point science in a direction that could be described as a ‘flight forward’, a flight forward in the hope of a constant technological increase in the complexity of artificial processes - up to immortality. Perhaps as a counterpoint to this flight, Greiner is showing his installation ‘The Molecular Ordering of Computational Plants’, which he realised with the composer and musician Tyler Friedman.

This installation is an immersive experience. The light is completely extinguished in seven steps. In addition to a text by Tyler Friedman, which is performed by six voices, algae begin to glow at the end of the piece.

The algae (which were cultivated by the artist) use the glow in their natural environment as a defence mechanism. However, they also have the special ability to bind carbon and remove it from the atmosphere. Here as living sculptures, as performers, they are also a manifestation of the text, the sound installation. The text states: ‘The new humans will be simple, effective and interconnected, like optimised, manipulated cells, like algae in the sea, on spaceship Earth.’

Although the quote sounds like an optimising reduction and management of human complexity, it is not about a simplification of the body into lonely organisms, but about the creation of a new form of society, a union of beings that continue to live constructively.

In a kind of dystopian dilemma, Greiner nevertheless shows two possible developments: on the one hand, the synthetic reinvention of life, and on the other, speculative simplification. The latter idea is, to put it provocatively, perhaps simply a possibility of how this world can remain habitable in the future.

The questions continue: Should we rather seek refuge on another planet?

Or should we change our lives and our common existence?

Another dilemma that we find on the two lower floors and in the sculpture garden: If there is no Planet B for the majority, some do not see Earth as the only spaceship.

One of our discussions with Andreas led us to a statement by Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon and the richest man in the world: In an interview, he said that Mars should be made habitable because the Earth will soon be destroyed. Regardless of the fact that the probability of moving humanity to Mars in this millennium is low, one has to wonder what the priorities of research are and, above all, why one of the world's most powerful CEOs continues to pollute the Earth while looking to the sky. This perspective is similar to the transhumanist thought that allows such a flight forward: the unwavering belief in consumption and growth.

To build a bridge to this year's Kaiserring winner, you can think of Barbara Kruger's photo with the slogan ‘I shop therefore I am’. Then you realise that art has long since addressed the issue of consumer criticism. This slogan is still relevant, even if the context has changed and the ecological urgency has become more conscious.

Without wanting to blame the consumer, consumption is part of the problem. Consumption may be necessary for economic growth in the capitalist system, but it also consumes resources and is dependent on them. Without approaching social aspects, this type of growth means CO2 emissions, deforestation, slash-and-burn and massive species extinction for the environment.

How should we imagine future landscapes when most organisms have died?

Andreas has answered this question with artificial intelligence. The images he has generated could be memories of dead forests. They are a digital representation of a forest, based on a data set of 1,000 images that Greiner took in Hambach Forest and in Białowieża in Poland. The first forest has now become a symbol of resistance to coal mining in Germany, while the second is one of the last remaining primeval forests in Europe.

These images not only serve as a memento mori of the living, as a reminder of a rich nature in the romantic sense, but also as a starting point for a further thought: technological advances allow us to be greener, we drive electric cars and send emails instead of letters, but the consumption of electricity and resources is increasing. We simply want more.

In the process of creating this work, Greiner realised that he used significantly more electricity to render the images for his project than the average German adult uses in a year. Greiner uses infographics and texts to present this realisation in conjunction with other data, such as the production of coal in Germany.

Similar to Hans Haacke, he presents this data and his own interpretation of it on panels. However, not as a sociological or institutional critique, but to express a profound paradox that surely affects us all. But especially him as an artist who no longer flies or consumes meat. He is part of the capitalist world, eco-conscious and a role model in this respect, but through his art alone he contributes to CO2 emissions.

A huge coal excavator can be seen in the background beneath a photograph showing the edge of the clearing in Hambach Forest. Under the picture, Greiner writes about the extent to which we are part of a contradictory eco-system. This text is like a link between the exhibition space and the garden. A small hornbeam can be seen through the window next to it.

After the algae on the upper floor, this other living sculpture reminds us of the pioneer of the ecology movement James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, life on earth should be understood as a single organism. Every living being has an indirect effect on another, and the depiction of other non-human beings in Greiner's art opens up a new window on ecology.

The hornbeam was placed by Greiner together with the artist Paul Rohlfs, near three oaks and basalt columns that Joseph Beuys planted in the sculpture garden three years after he received the Kaiserring. By analogy with Beuys, Greiner could say, ‘Trees are important for saving the human soul.’

However, Greiner's hornbeam is a symbol of contradiction. Greiner has calculated that the tree must live for more than 130 years in order to have metabolised and absorbed the consumption of all the excess carbon dioxide released for the production of the series of pictures. Even more than saving the human soul, the trees in this sense initially point the way to the continued existence of mankind.

As part of a new generation of ecological artists, Greiner shows that art can condense information and find new kinds of representations that mould the viewer. In other words, Andreas Greiner's exhibition is an opportunity to shed the passivity triggered by the flood of information and to develop a lasting curiosity. It gives the imagination access to other beings and cosmologies and allows us to rethink our near and distant surroundings.

I hope you will experience this too.

Thank you Andreas and good luck in creating new works of meaning. Perhaps some works rightly need more energy.