Di. 01.12.2026 Online Lecture: What Comes After Industry? Notes on the INDUSTRIAL Trilogy

Kryvyi Rih Cultural Centre / KRCC invites you to ​​“What Comes After Industry? Notes on the INDUSTRIAL Trilogy”, an online lecture by curators Inke Arns and Thibaut de Ruyter. The event is part of the educational programme “After Industry: The Future of Kryvyi Rih”, which accompanies the exhibition “Tell Me a Story About Kryvyi Rih”.

How do former industrial spaces become venues for art and creative work? What role did the subcultures of the 1980s play in shaping the idea of industrial heritage? And how are today’s logistics routes influencing the development of the Ruhr region? Inke Arns and Thibaut de Ruyter will explore these questions through three exhibitions they have developed since 2013 under the shared title INDUSTRIAL.

The first exhibition toured six Polish cities (Łódź, Gdańsk, Bytom, Kraków, Tarnów and Warsaw) and explored how industrial spaces are repurposed as venues for art and creative work. The second presented the full scope of the curators’ research into the relationship between art and industry, with a particular focus on how the subcultures of the 1980s helped shape the concept of industrial heritage. The third exhibition, currently on view in Dortmund, looks at the recent development of the Ruhr region in the context of the “New Silk Roads”, large-scale logistics and development projects connecting Asia and Europe.

The curators will present all three projects and discuss with participants how the questions raised by the exhibitions resonate with Kryvyi Rih today.

Registered participants will receive the link by email one day before the event.

Registration — https://forms.gle/9tr7cogJ4NAd3es29 
Language — English with consecutive interpretation into Ukrainian.

The event is supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Kyiv Office – Ukraine.

Dr. Inke Arns is the director of the Kunsthalle Dortmund. Curator and author in the fields of media art and theory, net cultures and Eastern Europe who has worked internationally since 1993. 2021 – 2022 Visiting Professor for Curatorial Practice at the Art Academy Münster. Curator of the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo (artist: Jakup Ferri), 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2022). Recent exhibitions: the Goethe-Institut’s travelling exhibition Die Grenze (including Almaty, Tashkent, Kyiv and Minsk) (2017-19), Artists & Agents. Performance Art and Secret Service (2019), House of Mirrors: AI as Phantasm (2022), Was ist Kunst, IRWIN? (2023), Comrade Sun (2024/2025), Robotron: Working Class and Intelligentsia (2025/2026). She is the author of articles and books on contemporary art, media art and net culture (most recently: Tutorials, Wagenbach, 2024), and has edited numerous exhibition catalogues.

Thibaut de Ruyter is a French-German curator and critic and lives in Berlin. As a trained architect, he designs exhibitions on conceptual and spatial level since 2009. His interests range from the archaeology of new media and the relationship between art and architecture to the art scenes of Central Asia and the post-socialist countries — themes that also shape his curatorial work: the Nam June Paik Award (Düsseldorf, Bochum), the Goethe-Institut’s travelling exhibition Die Grenze (including Almaty, Tashkent, Kyiv and Minsk) (2017-19), 26 x Bauhaus (Berlin, Munich, Bremen) and the Krasnoyarsk Biennale. In 2025, he curated exhibitions at the ifa Gallery in Berlin and Art Station Samarkand. He is a member of AICA-France and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Yerevan, Armenia.

Kryvyi Rih Cultural Centre / KRCC is a civic initiative dedicated to developing culture, the arts and the creative industries in Kryvyi Rih. Its mission is to build on the city’s cultural potential and create conditions for its local cultural and creative community to thrive.