ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe mourns the loss of Gerhard Johann Lischka. The cultural philosopher, media theorist, curator, and artist died in Bern on June 8, 2026. With his death, ZKM loses a companion of more than two decades: an author and editor, an exhibition maker and interlocutor – and an artist whose archive it holds.
Born in Muntlix in Vorarlberg in 1943, Lischka studied literature, art history, and philosophy in Bern and Munich and wrote his doctoral thesis on Oskar Kokoschka's dual talent as painter and poet. That choice of subject already held the concern that would run through his life: a refusal to keep image and word, art and thought apart. For nearly six decades, Bern was the center of his life and work. From 1969 onward he organized symposia and artistic actions, curated exhibitions, and conceived programs for radio and television; he was among the first to exhibit Polaroids as art. In the 1980s and 1990s he was one of the theorists who helped establish media theory as an independent field of discourse in the German-speaking world.
What distinguished his work was precisely his resistance to the notion of the work. Lischka left behind not a system but a practice: thinking in the process of becoming. Its true form was conversation – the interview, the dialogue, the "polylogue." For decades he sought out the artists and thinkers of his time, from Andy Warhol, VALIE EXPORT, and Jean Baudrillard to Vilém Flusser, Niklas Luhmann, and Friedrich Kittler. He turned the tape recorder into an instrument of theory: a way of thinking that did not pass judgment on art after the fact but unfolded alongside it. Terms such as "mediatization," "super-aesthetics," and, latterly, "Mind Art" were not classifications for him but tools for taking the measure of the present. Where others separated production from reception, he declared everyone a "mediator." The word he chose for himself, "artist-philosopher" – applied with well-measured exaggeration – named exactly this position in between.
Lischka and Peter Weibel shared an intellectual friendship that grew over decades. Both came from the milieu of action and media art; both distrusted the division of labor between art and theory. Their conversations gave rise to a genre of their own. Their joint polylogue "Im Netz der Systeme" (In the Net of Systems, Kunstforum, 1989) is a remarkable document of German-language media theory: two voices that seek not consensus but to map a field. It was followed by the conference volumes produced at ZKM in 2003 and 2004 – Das Regime des Images, Act! Handlungsformen in Kunst und Politik, and Die Medien der Kunst: Die Kunst der Medien – and by Lischka's book Media Poet, Peter Weibel (2011). Weibel, who died in 2023, captured Lischka's many voices succinctly: as author and editor, lecturer and organizer, artist and curator, Lischka was "creator and witness, sender and receiver, detective and archivist, administrator of the past and shaper of the present – always in the mode of thinking."
Through Weibel, Lischka formed a close bond with ZKM. Here he realized the exhibitions PVC3 Elektronische Kunst (2002) and art_clips.ch.at.de (2007), as well as the editions Am Nerv der Zeit (2003), comprising more than fourteen hours of audio recordings from 1974–1990, and DENKSTOFF. Dichte Gedanken (2013). It is also thanks to his mediation that ZKM holds the performance library of "Perforum."
In 2014, Lischka gave his archive to ZKM during his lifetime. It comprises eleven linear meters: collections of material and notes, whose documents have been fully digitized; a slide collection documenting nearly five hundred artistic positions; VHS and audio cassettes; and the devices he worked with. Tellingly, he arranged these materials chronologically, but also under keywords such as sleep, beauty, and body. The archive is not a repository of works but the model of a mind. On the occasion of the donation, ZKM dedicated the exhibition GJ Lischka. Present Mind [Geistesgegenwärtig] to him in 2014 – a title that describes better than any other what distinguished him, and what is now missing.
What remains is accessible: the books, the tapes, the voices of others that he preserved. It is his own that is missing.
MR