City Limits / Conrad Schnitzler: Sometimes it gets out of hand and turns into music

With City Limits and Conrad Schnitzler: Sometimes it gets out of hand and turns into music, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is showing two exhibitions in parallel.

The exhibition City Limits features the works of three artists: Yael Efrati (b. 1978 in Israel), Asta Gröting (b. 1961 in Germany), and Monika Sosnowska (b. 1972 in Poland), who belong to the same generation but grew up in very different sociopolitical contexts. While Gröting came of age in prosperous post-war Germany, Sosnowska grew up in communist Poland and Efrati in a family of Eastern European immigrants in Israel.

Despite their cultural differences, these artists are interested in similar artistic strategies to explore architectural elements and discover how they reflect different political, social, and historical realities.

Their sculptures have a clear historical background, from the rubble of World War II to the architecture of the communist era in Sosnowska’s work to the uprooting of people displaced by the same war and its aftermath in Israel in Efrati’s work.

The exhibition ran from November 2021 to February 2022 at the Center for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, Poland, which is the main producer of the exhibition along with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. After its stop at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, in 2023 the exhibition will travel to the Bat Yam Museum of Art in Israel.

The exhibition is curated by Sergio Edelsztein (Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv) with co-curator Joanna Kiliszek, and by Gregor Jansen and Alicia Holthausen at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

The project is organised and co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Centre of Polish Sculpture.

The aim of the project Conrad Schnitzler: Sometimes it gets out of hand and turns into music, which includes an exhibition and a festival program, is to reassess the extensive work of Conrad Schnitzler (b. 1937 in Düsseldorf, d. 2011 in Berlin). The show is a cooperation between the imai—Inter Media Art Institute and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

In the exhibition, the audiovisual works of the sculptor, musician, composer, as well as video, performance, and conceptual artist are brought together and made tangible. The festival program invites Schnitzler’s contemporaries and successors to intervene in spaces at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and to contextualize and reflect on his work through discussions, installations, performances, screenings, and concerts.

To this day, Schnitzler is revered around the world as a pioneer of electronic music, even though he did not seek to make music himself and strictly rejected the commercial sale of his works. A lively international network developed around him, which propagated and realized the free circulation, reproduction, and performance of his audio and visual works. Schnitzler’s artistic legacy will now be institutionally recognized for the first time together with the artistic community around him.

Participating artists: Conrad Schnitzler, Noemi Büchi, Cengiz Mengüç, Ken Montgomery, Ulrike Rosenbach, Wolfgang Seidel, Nika Son, Tolouse Low Trax, Keiko Yamamoto, and many others

The exhibition is curated by Stefan Schneider (artist, musician) and Linnea Semmerling (Inter Media Art Institute) with Gregor Jansen and Alicia Holthausen (both Kunsthalle Düsseldorf).

The project is funded by Musikfonds e.V. by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media (BKM), as part of the NEUSTART KULTUR recovery programme and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.