2021 Program Preview

At Haus der Kunst, we see the arts as a form of empowerment, a necessary upcycling force, a fundamental mode of transmission of the historical dimension of contemporaneity. Under its new directorship, Haus der Kunst’s 2021 program sprouts from different ways of conceiving, making, and exhibiting art. It interrogates artistic, social, and cultural structures; it imagines what may exist beyond them. It sprouts across, beyond, through histories, nations, and genders. The program feeds from the transformative potential of bodies in space and the energy produced by togetherness, inclusion, sharing, and care. It is attentive to how language participates in radical social transformations and welcomes emancipatory forms of expression as performance, dance, and sound, embracing their fleetingness. Music in particular brings the program together by generating intense moments of attunement and collective experience. The processes of twisting and tweaking, composing and recomposing, will permeate the transformative pathway of Haus der Kunst throughout 2021, towards a softening of internal and external spaces, hierarchies, stereotypes and towards the city and that environment in transformation we still call world.

Phyllida Barlow. frontier
March 3, 2021–July 25, 2021

With this major retrospective of the work of British sculptor Phyllida Barlow (*1944), Haus der Kunst 2021 opens a series of exhibitions in the museum’s East Wing dedicated to contemporary female voices. frontier offers an important opportunity to encounter Barlow’s remarkable challenges of the limits and thresholds of sculptural practice. Featuring several new site-specific works, alongside key pieces from exhibitions from the past two decades, and a vast selection of works on paper, frontier is a testament to Barlow’s lifelong dedication to exploring the formal and material possibilities of sculpture across multiple media. The exhibition foregrounds the manner in which her sculptural practice questions the structures of the objects that exist in the world.

Curated by: Damian Lentini; Curatorial assistance: Lisa Paland
Supported by: Henry Moore Foundation & Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne

Felix Brenner, Andreas Maus, KarHang Mui. euward8
April 30, 2021–June 27, 2021

In 2021, Haus der Kunst welcomes the winners of the euward European Award for Painting and Graphic Arts. Since 2000, the Augustinum Foundation has awarded the euward triennially, honoring artists working in the context of intellectual disability and contributing to their visibility and recognition. Felix Brenner (*1955) creates wall-sized, symbolically charged image installations in which he represents his life as a kind of assemblage of events. Andreas Maus’ (*1964) pencil and ballpoint drawings tell of human abysses, suffering, persecution, and torture in all phases of recent German history. In his diary-like artist’s books, he reflects exclusion and its consequences. In the vibrantly expressive pencil drawings of KarHang Mui (*1989), the distinctions between landscape and architecture, abstraction and figuration, reality and transcendence seem to be blurred. The artist’s fantastic dream worlds are permeated by his finely-textured lines.

Curated by: Sabine Brantl, Klaus Mecherlein

Sweat
June 11, 2021–January 9, 2022

The result of two years of intensive research, Sweat brings together more than 20 artistic voices that respond to several conditions of political pressure. The artistic positions range from present-day to pioneering works from the 1970s and ‘80s that mobilized feminist and postcolonial movements in art and society, opening up historical perspectives on artistic languages that were embedded in forms of radical social emancipation. Sweat is traversed by unique poetics of pleasure and polyphony. These counter politics of enmity and exclusion through the creation of sensual acts of self-determination and the materialization of stories that have hitherto been silenced and rendered invisible.

With: Pacita Abad, Mohamed Bourouissa, chameckilerner, Mary Beth Edelson, Philipp Gufler, Eisa Jocson, Isaac Julien, Natalia LL, Daniel Lind-Ramos, MAHKU (Movement of Huni Kuin Artists), António Ole, Santiago Reyes, Tabita Rezaire, Guadalupe Rosales, Jacolby Satterwhite, Tschabalala Self, Tuesday Smillie, João Pedro Vale & Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, Leandro Vieira, Kaylene Whiskey, Zadie Xa

Curated by: Raphael Fonseca, Anna Schneider; Curatorial assistance: Elena Setzer

Heidi Bucher: Metamorphoses
September 17, 2021–January 16, 2022

Heidi Bucher (*1923, †1993) is a key representative of the international neo-avant-gardes, whose sculptural latex-works combine the art of modernism with that of the present. Metamorphoses presents her performative and simultaneously material concept of sculpture. She took possession of spaces and objects by applying liquid rubber to surfaces and skinning them. With these radical material transformations, she explored human forms of existence and their embedding in social and private power structures. Metamorphoses exhibits Bucher’s artistic beginnings, her experimental period in New York and Los Angeles, her main work of architectural and human skinning, and poetic material collages. The long preparation of this over 100 works retrospective has brought to light unknown works as well as source materials that highlight Bucher’s significance alongside acknowledged fellow artists.

Curated by: Jana Baumann; Curatorial assistance: Luisa Seipp
Supported by: Pro Helvetia, Schweizer Kulturstiftung

Music Program
2021 onwards

Music will be an integral part of Haus der Kunst program. The Music Program will host monthly residencies for international and national artists working with sound and music. It will bring together sonic practices and weave their histories and traditions into present and future worlds, engaging with new feelings and critical ideas and inviting audiences to experience unique aural acts installed and performed across the museum’s various spaces.

Curated by: Sarah Miles

HDK Summer Sessions
July 2021

The HDK Summer Sessions are a hybrid exhibition model exploring different notions of liveness, consisting of time-based, performative and sonic practices that resonate with the existing exhibitions, transcending the institution’s walls into the city and the digital realm. The first Summer Session explores music and dance’s ways of caring for the self and of reinserting historical legacies into contemporary popular culture through film screenings, concerts, dance performances, and newly commissioned audio-visual works.

Curated by: Sarah Miles, Elena Setzer & Sarah Johanna Theurer

Super BOOKS
July 2021

Haus der Kunst will host the second edition of Super BOOKS. Over three days, more than 50 international artists, designers, and independent publishers will show their publications in the Terrace Hall of the museum.

Curated by: Sabine Brantl (Haus der Kunst) with Hubert Kretschmer (AAP Archive Artist Publications), Martin Schmidl (Academy of Fine Arts Munich), Quirin Brunnmeier, and Malte Wandel (fructa space).

[Please note, that due to the current situtation, all dates may be subject to change.]