Some of Halle's collections and museums, each introduced by one exhibit from the collection, selected by the museum's curators:

Beatles Museum
A small private museum that was founded in 1989 in Cologne and moved to Halle in 2000. The building was provided by the city of Halle, the museum funds itself.

Botanischer Garten (University Collections)
The Botanical Garden is part of Halle's university collections and the destination of one of the excursions of the 6th Werkleitz Biennale. The exhibit is a plant that is extinct in free nature.

Franckesche Stiftungen (Cabinet of wonders)
The Franckesche Stiftungen originated with the Pietistic educational establishment of the same name and accommodates a Baroque Cabinet of Wonders (one of the few still existing), an art and natural-history collection with surprisingly few pictures (Pietism), and a large number of exotica stemming from missionary work. The miniature sedan-chair is also from this tradition, but mainly reveals the educational intent of the collection – this is how big and strange the world is.

In the Cabinet of Wonders, the exhibits are stored in cabinets that are partially embellished with illustrations explaining the context.

Geiseltalmuseum (University Collections)
The Geiseltalmuseum displays remnants of fossil plants and animals that were found during lignite strip mining in Geiseltal, a valley 20 kilometres to the south-west of Halle, and of which the early horses are only the best known.

Halloren Schokoladenmuseum (Chocolate museum)
The Halloren Schokoladenmuseum was opened in 2002 in the historical part of the Halloren Chocolate Factory. It is a company museum that also shows the "lucent production" of its goods.

Händel-Haus
Georg Friedrich Händel was born in Halle in 1685. Since 1948, the house where he was born accommodates Halle's music museum. Next to the collection and working section dedicated to Händel's life, oeuvre, and the reception of his compositions, the museum is also scientifically concerned with the regional history of music and contains a rich collection of historical musical instruments. Research is being conducted here on the most precious common property – Händel's music – within the frame of work on the Hallesche Händel Edition. The museum and archive stocks are still important for making accessible Händel's heritage: starting with the composer's manuscripts, which in Halle are unfortunately only available on microfilm, to the early prints and first editions, up to portraits and other materials bearing historical witness that give insights into Händel's personality or give an account and illustrate the history of the performance of his work. To make his music come alive, especially with regard to the today customary revitalisation of historical performance practices, additional historical material that is itself valuable common property is helpful: for example the historical instruments on which research is conducted in the museum and which have often been copied, or the historical sources on performance practices and musical events of the time.

Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte
The museum for palaeontology originated from bourgeois collecting activities at the end of the 19th century and from historical societies that were popular in Germany during that time. In addition to preserving historic monuments, the museum supports archaeological sites, and maintains an archive as well as a library. Since the region around Halle was almost continuously settled after the ice receded, there have been finds in the area dating back to the Palaeolithic Age. The exhibition contribution consists of three Neolithic showpiece axes.

Cooperplate engraving collection
The Royal Copperplate Engraving Collection was established in 1820. Adam Emanuel Weise started the collection chiefly for teaching and research purposes because there was no art collection available to the students in Halle at the time. The approx. 11.000 copperplates are reproduced engravings of important paintings sorted according to schools of painting and countries. After the Copperplate Engraving Collection was given to the Galerie Moritzburg in 1958, the Martin Luther University again received the collection in 1994 on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Halle Alma Mater.

Marienbibliothek
The Marienbibliothek is a church library with a complete collection of books from the 15th to 18th century. The library is accessible upon arrangement.

Domestic-Animal Museum "Julius Kühn"
Julius Kühn was a 19th-century agronomist and founded at the University of Halle an experimental domestic-animal garden. From this stock, the collection of skeletons was essentially built up between 1865 and 1940. Next to the skeletons stored in wooden boxes, the museum possesses a collection of photographs and an earlier collection of paintings that reveal the techniques of scientific study of the 19th century.

Phonetic Collection (University Collections)
The historical collection of the Institute of Speech Science and Phonetics includes experimental phonetic devices and a sound archive. The spoken recordings contain poetry, simultaneous recordings of discussions and speeches, as well as acoustic documents from phonetic research and the field of voice and speech therapy. The devices represent a journey through time in terms of technological developments in sound recording and sound ranging. The stock comprises a total of around 8,000 collected sound recordings, including 1,500 shellac and wax records, 110 cylinders and about 20 sound foils.
The collection contains what may very well be the only existing cartoon with a phonetic joke.

Robertinum
The Robertinum is the University of Halle's archaeological museum and a «typical university collection for teaching, like they originated in the 18th and 19th century to convey a view of classical antique culture that was regarded as a model.

Next to coins and original sculptures, the Robertinum contains in its original building a large number of plaster casts made from the originals, the casting moulds of which are stored in Berlin. At the time being, the Robertinum is open only two hours a week.
A plaster cast of a horse's head from the Parthenon is the museum's contribution to the exhibition.

Schützenhaus Glaucha und Christian-Wolff-Haus (Municipal museum)
Halle's various municipal collections are united in the Städtische Museen (Municipal Museums). They include the Christian-Wolff-Haus, the Schützenhaus Glaucha and the Technik und Salinenmuseum (Technical and Salt-works Museum). Prior to German unification, the Municipal Museum in the Schützenhaus Glaucha understood itself as a museum for the revolutionary workers with its main focus on workers' culture. While there are considerations to keep this location open, the part of the Municipal Museum in the Christian-Wolff Haus, the residential building and adjacent factory of an old printer's family from Halle, is currently being expanded. The museum conveys object-oriented urban history; the intention of the collection is to establish contexts for which these objects stand. The Municipal Museum also serves as the venue for many closed collections in Halle within the frame of thematic exhibitions.

The loan from the Schützenhaus is the statue of a the "Small Trumpeter", a martyr of the workers from Halle who was either killed by the police in the Volkspark or fell from the balustrade when he was drunk – at any rate, he died there. The "Small Trumpeter", the backdrop for the "Jugendweihe" (the traditional GDR ceremony in which fourteen-year-old are given adult social status), was attacked with paint bombs and toppled from its plinth after German unification.

From the Christian-Wolff-Haus comes the axe with which Johann Friedrich Struensee was executed; it stands, here, for the documentation of Enlightenment in Halle.

Stiftung Moritzburg
By 1933, the municipal museum, which was founded in 1885, had become one of Germany's most important museums of modern art. The main focus of the collection was on German Expressionism, Constructivism and Bauhaus painting. In 1933, a "poison chamber" was initially installed where paintings classified as "degenerate" could be viewed after signing a document.

Among others, Samuel Beckett was able to visit this chamber. In 1937, a large part of the paintings was passed on to the "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art) exhibition and subsequently sold. Two incunabula of Expressionism, Emil Nolde's "Abendmahl" (Last Supper) and Franz Marc's "Tierschicksale" (Fate of the Animals) are today in museums in Copenhagen and Basle respectively. Two paintings by Max Beckmann remained in the museum as not (yet) "degenerate", while paintings and graphics by El Lissitzky mysteriously survived the National Socialist iconoclasm inside the museum. In 1945, the attempt was made to re-establish the former collection, but after the currency reform in 1949 and the commencement of rigid cultural policies this was no longer possible. The institutions of the GDR had no access to the Western art market.

Up to 1990, predominantly GDR art was collected that is currently only shown in special exhibitions, but is to be displayed permanently again in the section "Art after 1945". Yet the collection always defines itself as not merely regional. Lyonel Feininger's pictures of Halle in the collection now function as a model.

Two loans were proposed: a picture by Per Kirkeby and one by Hermann Bachmann, which are meant to highlight the international as well as regional orientation of the collection.