Emerging Artists at the Hamburg Fair 2026
Wondering what’s in store at our Hamburg fair? Don’t miss the Emerging Artists Exhibition 2026: ‘Common Ground’, showing the conceptual works of three artists who have their artistic focus in Hamburg.
Hannah Weber-Heidenfels
Friday 14 August, 2026
Since 2012, the Emerging Artists exhibitions at Affordable Art Fair Hamburg have given a curated platform to new, unrepresented talents.
Looking back on the last 13 years, the visibility generated by the Emerging Artists exhibitions has been integral in supporting artists at the start of their careers when the art world is often difficult to break into.
Emerging Artists Hamburg 2026: ‘Common Ground’
Curated by Fair Manager Hannah Weber-Heidenfels, Emerging Artists Hamburg 2026 presents the conceptual practices of three artists whose work is deeply rooted in Hamburg: Jianan Ning, Julia Nordholz and Lulu MacDonald.
The exhibition is kindly supported by Artbutler.
As a space of contemplation within the dynamic atmosphere of the fair, visitors are invited to pause, reflect, and establish their own personal relationship with the artworks. Bringing together three distinct artistic positions, which all connect under the topic of re-arranging the relationship between human beings and the nature upon which they depend.
The exhibition unfolds as an immersive spatial experience in which each practice constructs its own unique world of perception. The works on display challenge the prevailing human-centred perspective and disrupt established hierarchies between humanity and nature. Visitors are invited to enter a more-than-human realm—one that questions the assumption of the human being as the centre of the world and establishes an environment in which nature takes on an active and leading role.
Through their artistic practices, Ning, Nordholz, and MacDonald explore questions surrounding the use and transformation of resources, the preservation of memories, and the relationship between living environments and human presence. In this context, sustainability is understood not only as an ecological necessity, but as an attitude of care, transformation, and responsible engagement.
The participating artists this year:
Jianan Ning
Snow and eco-friendly pigments | 2019.
Growing up and studying in China, a society shaped by many layers of rules, traditions, and established systems, Ning developed an interest in questioning structures that are already in place. His background in painting at Renmin University of China, followed by his artistic practice in Hamburg, has allowed him to move between different cultural perspectives. His work connects Chinese cultural traditions with contemporary social realities, exploring the relationships between construction and destruction, nature and human order.
Construction and deconstruction are therefore not opposites. They are part of the same continuous process.
Jianan Ning’s artistic practice begins with a fundamental question: ‘Why should it be like this?’ His work examines systems that appear stable because they have been constructed through human-made rules. These systems can be political, social, architectural, cultural, or symbolic. Humans build barriers, establish borders, create structures, and determine where something can or cannot go. At the same time, these structures can protect, control, restrict, and ultimately destroy.
Ning’s works ask what happens when the structures people have created begin to lose their stability. What happens when a barrier breaks? What happens when a system can no longer protect itself? What remains after an established structure has been destroyed? The collapse of a system may not simply mean the end of something. It may be the beginning of another space and allow nature to return. And it reveals that every system created by humans is, ultimately, temporary.
Porcelain occupies an important position within Ning’s exploration of cultural and social structures. It is beautiful, refined, historically significant, and strongly connected to Chinese cultural identity. At the same time, porcelain is fragile: a material that can withstand pressure but can suddenly break. Traditional Chinese landscape painting becomes particularly important in this context. Its beauty and historical depth stand in contrast to images of war, political instability, and contemporary control.
Warning tape is one of the simplest examples of a human-made barrier. It communicates a clear instruction: do not cross.
Its physical strength is almost insignificant. Its power comes from a shared understanding of its meaning. People obey the tape because they recognize the system of rules behind the symbol. Ning uses this simple material to question how much of the surrounding world is controlled through symbols, conventions, and collective agreement. The barrier does not need to be physically strong to be effective. It only needs to be believed in.
Julia Nordholz
Julia Nordholz works at the intersection of art, ecology and social practice. Her transdisciplinary work explores the relationships between humans, non-human life and the environments they share. Through immersive and participatory installations, sound, sculpture, video, painting, performance and text, she creates situations in which the boundaries between observer and the observed become fluid.
A central concern of Nordholz’s practice is to make voices audible that are usually overlooked or silenced. She is particularly interested in threatened trees, forests, waters and other ecosystems, as well as in the plants and organisms that inhabit them. Rather than treating nature as a passive object of observation, she seeks ways of giving non-human life a presence within social and cultural discourse.
Climate change and environmental transformation form an important context for her work. Nordholz is interested not only in the ecological consequences of climate change, but also in the ways societies perceive, discuss and respond to them. Individual experiences, political structures and cultural perspectives influence how environmental crises are understood. Her work therefore asks how artistic practice can create spaces for dialogue and how people and ecosystems can be given greater agency.
Her work with fugues, seeds and urban spaces develops these questions through the relationship between musical composition and ecological growth. The fugue becomes a conceptual model for understanding how different voices can exist within one structure. In a fugue, individual voices enter successively, repeat, transform and respond to one another. No voice exists completely independently; each becomes meaningful through its relationship to the others.
Nordholz transfers this compositional principle into the city. The seeds she collects in urban spaces become individual voices. They are found in cracks, gaps and neglected areas where plants emerge through the structures created by humans. These small ruptures reveal that the city is never completely controlled. Even within highly organized urban environments, other forms of life continue to grow, adapt and claim space.
The cracks and gaps of the city therefore become pauses within a composition. A pause in music is not simply an absence of sound. It creates space for another sound to appear. In the same way, an empty or unused space in the city can create an opportunity for something else to emerge.
Lulu MacDonald
Lulu MacDonald works as a visual storyteller through sculpture, installation and writing. Storytelling is central to her practice, transforming spaces marked by grief, extraction and neo-capitalist greed into moments of collective reflection and possibility. Her installations often exist as temporary encounters that resist complete documentation, rejecting the idea that art can be fully experienced through images alone. Instead, they insist on presence, participation and shared experience.
Her practice moves between the intimate and the monumental, the personal and the ecological, the everyday and the mythological. At its centre is an ongoing interest in the ways objects, landscapes and living organisms carry histories, memories and forms of vulnerability. Her works emerge through processes of conscious building and unbuilding, in which sculptures seem to press through surfaces, rise from the ground or hover at the edges of water and architecture.
Growing up on a Channel Island, MacDonald’s understanding of place is shaped by the experience of living within a geographical and cultural in-between space. The island is a place of contradictions: geographically isolated yet deeply connected to larger political and economic systems, culturally specific yet influenced by histories of migration, trade and exchange. This sense of being between different conditions continues to inform her artistic approach.
145 x 98 cm | 2024.
For MacDonald, landscape is never simply a passive background. It is political, cultural and deeply connected to the ways people inhabit, use and transform the world around them. Nature becomes an active storyteller within her work, carrying memory, tenderness and omen rather than functioning merely as a backdrop to human narratives.
This also makes presence particularly important within her installations. Because the works are conceived as encounters rather than fixed images, their meaning develops through movement, sound, scale, light and the physical presence of the viewer. Her collaborations with photographers, costume designers and musicians further expand this spatial and filmic quality, layering object, sound and movement.
60 x 60 x 185 cm | 2024.
You’ll be able to see all of these artworks within our ‘Emerging Artists Hamburg 2026’ exhibition at our upcoming fair this November. Take a look back at our former Emerging Artist exhibitions.
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