Winter/spring program 2020

Kunstverein München is pleased to announce its program for winter/spring 2020.

Archive Space
from February 29, 2020 onwards

Examining the Kunstverein’s architectural conditions, artist Julian Göthe has developed the Archive Space that will become a permanent part of the institution. In the lead-up to the bicentennial anniversary in 2023, it offers a concrete room for preserving and negotiating the institution’s history, while also creating a space for public formats conceived in collaboration with archivists, (art) historians, and artists. These formats will enable the Kunstverein to reflect on its own institutional history as well as the gaps in it.

Göthe, who’s practice comprises collage, drawing, installation, and sculpture, has conceived an expansive installative work that draws on the building’s architecture and the programmatic history. The new housing of the archive gives the documents and their attendant discourse a fixed place within the Kunstverein’s architecture and artistic program, and forms both the foreground and background, venue and stage to critically engage with its past and potential futures. 


Pati Hill
Something other than either
March 7–May 3, 2020

This spring, Kunstverein München will present Pati Hill’s first posthumous institutional solo exhibition in Europe. Hill (b. 1921; d. 2014) left behind an artistic output spanning roughly 60 years and encompassing various disciplines. Untrained as an artist, she began to use the photocopier as an artistic tool in the early 1970s and continued to do so until her death, leaving behind an extensive oeuvre that oscillates between image and text. Besides this comprehensive body of xerographic work, she published four novels, a memoir, several short stories, wrote poetry, and made drawings.

By using the copier—a machine that was stereotypically linked to secretarial work and thus to feminized labor—to trace everyday objects such as a comb, a carefully folded pair of men’s trousers or a child’s toy, Hill developed an artistic practice by which she began a programmatic translation of invisible domestic labor into a visual and public language. The exhibition expands upon the xerographs and looks at the artist’s writing, publishing, and editing as practices that both interrogate and accompany the visual work. A fragmented, necessarily incomplete index of her exploration of image and text (re-)production, the exhibition encompasses xerographs, published novels, poetry, sketchbooks, unpublished manuscripts, and letters.

As part of the exhibition, a re-print of her 1979 publication, Letters to Jill. A catalogue and some notes on copying, in which Hill intended to explain and contextualize her working methodology, will be made available. Both are conceived in cooperation with the Pati Hill Collection, housed at Arcadia University and overseen by Richard Torchia, director of the school’s exhibition program.


Schaufenster
Schaufenster is an onsite and online series simultaneously presenting works in the two permanently accessible spaces of the institution—the window display facing the Hofgarten and the website. Inaugurated last year with video works by Patricia L. Boyd and Andrea Büttner, the series will continue its program in February with a thematic focus on political self-organization and (alternative) educational models.


Writers Residency
The Writers Residency is a new initiative that is aimed at authors and critics, as well as artists whose practice is based on writing. It is a cooperation with the Department of Arts and Culture of the City of Munich and consists of a two-month stay as well as a monthly stipend. Central to the residency is time and space to write—an activity that is often inadequately remunerated and too rarely the subject of funding programs within the art context. The Kunstverein sees this project in the context of curation, which derives from “curare,” the Latin word for “to look after; to care for”—originally used in relation to objects, but now extended to people and the hospitality towards them. Applications are now open.


Director: Maurin Dietrich
Curator: Gloria Hasnay
Associate Curator: Christina Ruederer

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