Name: Goethe Annual Lecture 2025 - Ackroyd & Harvey: Beuys’ Acorns
Start: 2025-11-20T18:30:00+00:00
End: 2025-11-20T21:00:00+00:00
Location: Goethe-Institut London

$Goethe Annual Lecture 2025 - Ackroyd & Harvey: Beuys\u2019 Acorns$

We welcome artist duo Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey as guest speakers for their lecture Beuys’ Acorns: The Prelude & The Planting.
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The Goethe Annual Lecture invites acclaimed speakers to share their perspectives on the themes that we explore through our cultural work, and on the most pressing issues that society are facing in the United Kingdom, Germany and worldwide.

For our 2025 Goethe Annual Lecture we welcome Ackroyd & Harvey as our guest speakers. Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have been collaborating as an artistic duo since 1990 and over these recent decades have made a name for themselves as pioneers of activism through their artistic practice. Their collaborations include Culture Declares Emergency and XR Writers Rebel, and their work has been commissioned, shown and honoured with awards by institutions such as Tate, Hayward Gallery, Wellcome Trust and the Royal Academy.

In their lecture, Ackroyd & Harvey will explore how a fable captured the artistic imagination of the German artist Joseph Beuys, leading to the creation of one of the most memorable land artworks of the 20th century: 7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration ('Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung'). The project was first presented to the public in 1982 at documenta 7. As a world-renowned contemporary art event, documenta takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. From 1982 to 1987, Beuys planted 7,000 oak trees in the city. In response to the extensive urbanisation of the setting, the work was a long-term and large-scale artistic and ecological intervention with the goal of an enduring alteration to Kassel’s urban realm.
Beuys' intervention captured the imaginations of Ackroyd and Harvey, inspiring them to collect acorns from 7,000 oaks and start growing hundreds of trees as part of their artistic practice. Since 2007, the artists have been nurturing Beuys' acorns in parallel with exhibitions and public dialogues reflecting on the cultural and environmental significance of trees in urban spaces. They are now planting circles of oaks with partners across the UK, creating a broad canopy of cultural engagement through a network of community participation. In their talk, they will reveal the key insights, influences and inspiration behind their remarkable and ever-growing journey with Beuys' acorns.

This event is supported by the Friends of the Goethe-Institut London.

The Goethe Annual Lecture 2025 will The screening is part of London Art+Climate Week, a multi-day event comprising exhibitions and activities across London focused on climate action in the arts.
Past speakers of our GOETHE ANNUAL LECTURE include Eyal Weizman MBE (2024), Katie Mitchell (2023), Mercedes Bunz, Mithu Sanyal, Matthew Herbert (all 2022), Dan Hicks (2021), Sharon Dodua Otoo (2020), John Kampfner (2019), Brendan Simms (2018), Anne McElvoy (2017), Neil MacGregor (2016), Christopher Clark (2014), David Chipperfield (2012), Norman Rosenthal (2010), Tacita Dean (2006), Peter Jonas (2005), Ian Kershaw (2003), Richard Wentworth (2002) and AS Byatt (2001).

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey - Artistic duo

Ackroyd & Harvey have been investigating Nature-based processes of growth and decay for over three decades, addressing the forces of anthropogenic climate breakdown and bio-diversity loss that are rapidly reshaping and rewriting Earth’s systems. Their time-based artworks intersect art, activism, architecture, biology, ecology and history, evolving through extended research in response to people and place, interfacing their profound interest in local ecologies and global planetary concerns.
In 2019, they co-founded Culture Declares Emergency, a collective of international and UK-based Hubs, sharing practical support to seek socio-ecological justice, and working towards regenerative change through culture, heritage and the arts. They have received international awards and prizes for their pioneering bio-chemical photography, including the Royal Academy Rose Award and have been widely commissioned for monumental interventions in the public realm, including London Olympics 2012; The David Attenborough Building, Cambridge; Aarhus Triennial; Derry-Londonderry UK City of Culture
Recent exhibitions include, The Gallery Season 5, Brazil/UK; Culture Reforesting, Orleans House Gallery, London; La Galeria, UC Merced, California; Science Gallery, London; European Capital of Culture Tartu 2024; RA Summer Exhibition; Hayward Gallery, London; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, USA; 23RD Biennale of Sydney, Australia; Somerset House, London; Lewisham Borough of Culture, London 2022; Tate Modern, London; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.