Andrea Lissoni, Director of Haus der Kunst, Munich’s renowned museum of contemporary art, today announced radical plans to expand and diversify the work of the institution in the coming years.
Speaking at the opening of the first major international exhibition of the work of Fujiko Nakaya, Andrea Lissoni said today:
“In a new era for Haus der Kunst, we want to sharpen the perspective of contemporary art by implicating many viewpoints, deploying multiple tools, and developing a critical context for the examination, articulation, illumination, and transmission of the historical dimension of contemporaneity, to best serve and engage our audiences, addressing the seismic cultural shifts at play through focused exhibitions, performance and music events, and education.
“This institutional reform is taking place at a critical time when artists are tackling the world’s global issues in their work. Experimental art forms are now embedded in many artists’ practices, embracing the digital realm, science, biological and artificial intelligence, blurring the boundaries between disciplines.”
From her rarely seen early paintings to her fog sculptures, including two new site-specific sculptures created especially for Haus der Kunst, along with single-channel videos, installations, and documentation that reveal Nakaya’s cultural and social references, this experiential exhibition will offer an in-depth survey of one of Japan’s foremost artists. The exhibition will be accompanied by a screening programme of films by Japanese production company Ivanami, conceived in collaboration with the Harvard Film Archive.
Dumb Type
6 May – 11 September 2022
The visionary performances and installations of the Japanese collective Dumb Type are at the forefront of debate concerning identity and sexual politics, as well as with the effects of technological progress on the body. Featuring three specially conceived installations, the exhibition interrogates how digital media and technology constitute a formative and irrevocable part of our lived experience, conflating the past with the future, desire with despair. Probing the dizzying banality of AI-inflected speech formation, the exhibition also premieres a new operatic sound sculpture of field recordings created by Ryuichi Sakamoto for Haus der Kunst.
Christine Sun Kim
May – 21 August 2022
Through large-scale murals, interventions in public space, and dynamic charcoal drawings, Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980, Orange County, California, USA) examines the social function of sound. For Haus der Kunst’s middle hall, the artist created a site-specific multimedia work that uses her own notation of American Sign Language to address experiences of duration, repetition, and emotional labour within ableist societies. Kim´s scaled-up, animated drawings of American Sign Language combined with text, form a spatial, corporeal and time-based composition that offers access to a multisensory communication model.
Carsten Nicolai
3 June – 17 July 2022
Carsten Nicolai (b. 1965, Berlin, Germany) fuses the disciplines of music, art, and science. Taking inspiration from the Zen gardens of Japan, which allow the gardener to observe patterns and abstract language in nature, Nicolai’s visual and sonic media installation sets the scene for chance compositions to emerge. To create his soundscape for the exhibition, the artist combined electromagnetic waves picked up by the historic antenna on the rooftop of Haus der Kunst along with instruments designed by Nicolai.
Tony Cokes
10 June – 23 October 2022
This exhibition marks Germany’s first solo show of the artist Tony Cokes (b.1956 Richmond, Virginia, USA) and the first collaboration to be staged between Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein München. Taking the historical connection between the two exhibition sites as a point of departure, Cokes will present newly commissioned works, titled “Some Munich Moments 1937-1972” that span both institutions and public space.
Since the late 1990s, Cokes has developed a unique language for video essays that vehemently rejects representative imagery. The artist’s fast-moving audiovisual works are based on found text fragments and pop music, stemming from different times and contexts.
Joan Jonas
9 September 2022 – 29 January 2023
The most comprehensive exhibition of work dedicated to visionary artist Joan Jonas (b.1936, New York) in Germany to date has been conceived by the artist and Haus der Kunst in collaboration with Tate Modern, London.
Characterised by her fundamental interest in cultural rites and the dynamic processes of mirroring, shifting, and redefining genre and time, this major retrospective is underpinned by themes that have recurred throughout Jonas’ career. Environmental issues, echoed in her early videos are central to multimedia installations, which address climate change and the threat to the ecosystem. Jonas also explores collective narratives of mythology, fairy tales and fables, setting them against a backdrop of contemporary, socio-political events.
Hamid Zénati
11 November 2022 – March 2023
Haus der Kunst is presenting the first institutional show of artist Hamid Zénati (b. 1944 in Constantine, Algeria, d. 2022 in Munich, Germany). Travelling between Munich and Algiers, Zénati’s six-decade-long career ranged from painting, to textile, to interior and fashion design — driven by an anarchic impetus to create. His practice transcends all boundaries of established media, conventions of style, and cultural origins.
Tune
Featuring Beatrice Dillon, Abdullah Miniawy, Christelle Oyiri, Stephen O’Malley, Kali Malone, Lucy Railton, Galya Bisengalieva, Lolina, JJJJJerome Ellis, Emiranda, Toxe, Mechatok, Caterina Barbieri, and Okkyung Lee.
“Tune”, a series of sound residencies, presents monthly artist performances, screenings and installations of solo works and collaborations. The invited artists move across genre, era and influence to explore microtonal compositions, to expand the sonic possibilities of a single instrument and to investigate the finer details of how sound constructs and decomposes time. The programme concentrates on the nature of making and performing sound through collage, narrative-driven works, walls of sound and improvisation.
About Haus der Kunst
Haus der Kunst, Munich, is a non-collecting public museum and a global centre for contemporary art. It is dedicated to the exploration of the diverse histories of contemporary art based on a foundation of focused exhibitions, performance and music events, and education. Through its programmes, Haus der Kunst affirms and acknowledges that the trajectories of contemporary art are global, multifocal, polysemic, and unbounded by cartographic, conceptual, and cultural limits. It was an important venue for featuring avant-garde works such as Picassos Guernica (1937) and has since then been transformed radically into an international centre of modern art exhibitions, and today a global museum of contemporary art. It is a place of dialogue and knowledge transfer and invites visitors to immerse themselves fully, both mentally and physically, in the world of contemporary art. hausderkunst.de/en
