Our Present

For many, the present seems incomprehensible and inexplicable. Although we are confronted daily with new diagnoses of the present–condensed into buzzwords such as digital change, post-factual age, migration society or climate crisis–we are losing our experience of the moment and of contemporaneity. Yesterday, today and tomorrow fall into one. The future is already happening in the present, which has not yet come to terms with the past. It seems that the present is either endless or disappearing altogether.

Against this background, the exhibition Our Present shows how artists relate to the present, and the forms that they give to it. The works exhibited address topics such as physicality, identity, politics and technology. By including different cultural contexts, in awareness of a common media sphere and its linkage of the past and the future, the exhibition opens up a multiple perspective to its viewers on differing ideas of the present today.

The exhibition Our Present marks the beginning of the 2020 programme under the artistic direction of Thomas Thiel, while simultaneously including a fresh presentation of the collections in the sense of revisualizing the past.

With contributions by Eric Baudelaire, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Forensic Oceanography/ Forensic Architecture, Geumhyung Jeong, Hanne Lippard, Basim Magdy, Frida Orupabo, Wong Ping, Clemens von Wedemeyer 

as well as works from the Lambrecht-Schadeberg Collection and the Contemporary Art Collection by Charles Atlas, Francis Bacon, John Baldessari, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Vajiko Chachkhiani, Simone Forti, Terry Fox, Lucian Freud, Bernhard Fuchs, Rupprecht Geiger, Dan Graham, Katharina Grosse, Hans Haacke, Hans Hartung, Lena Henke, Candida Höfer, Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Isaac Julien, Aglaia Konrad, Maria Lassnig, Jochen Lempert, Sol LeWitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Giorgio Morandi, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, Sigmar Polke, Charlotte Posenenske, Yvonne Rainer, Bridget Riley, Andrea Robbins/Max Becher, Emil Schumacher, Antoni Tàpies, Diana Thater, Niele Toroni, Cy Twombly, Stephen Willats and Fritz Winter.

MGKWalls: Nora Turato
The new site-specific exhibition series MGKWalls focuses an annual presentation on two prominent walls at the museum: the entrance wall in the foyer and the large LED wall on the external façade, which opens up the museum’s architecture to the city in a programmatic way and has been a distinctive feature of the building since its opening.

Nora Turato (*1991 in Zagreb, Croatia) is the first artist invited to be present on MGKWalls over a period of 12 months, with a large-format mural painting and changing digital collages on the façade. Essentially, her work is based on appropriated text-image fragments that circulate in the social media and news tickers of our smartphones each and every day. The parallel, dynamic presentation connects two worlds: the physical space of the institution and the digital space outside.
 

Supported by Kunststiftung NRW