Having been shown at the University Museum and the Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space, the exhibition now comes to the foyer of the lecture hall center of Poppelsdorf Campus (Friedrich-Hirzebruch-Allee 5, 53115 Bonn), from December 1, 2025 through February 10, 2026. Admission is free and the opening hours are Monday–Thursday from 8 am to 8 pm and Fridays from 8 am to 7 pm.
Initiated by the the University of Bonn Gender Equality Commissioner and University Communications and executed by Berlin-based science photographer Gesine Born and her Bilderinstitut, the exhibition “Bring the Portr[AI]ts!“ portrays women in science in a never-before-seen way.
High-contrast, bold poses
The visual language developed by Gesine Born brings women to the fore, as she explains: “I wanted their images to fit seamlessly into portrait galleries of male scientists of yore, communicating an equal standing. I thus employed high-contrast lighting and showed the subjects in the same bold poses that portraited men appeared in, with folded arms, for example.” The AI-based software platform Midjourney was used to generate images of a deceptively realistic quality. In cases where rare historical photographs of the woman exist, these are fed into the AI for processing along with place, time and other text information, which then creates the photo portrait that could and should have been made back then but wasn’t.
One exhibition photograph is a regular, recently taken image with no AI needed—representative of how leading women continue to be overlooked in many areas of academia, on into the present. Protestant theologian Professor Cornelia Richter (age 55) is opening many doors previously shut to women: as the first female dean of her faculty, the first female Senate chair and the first official female University Preacher. Additionally, she has just been installed as the first female bishop of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession (A.B.) in Austria.
Further information is available here:
Contact:
Gender Equality Office
Phone: +49 228 73-6574
