September 15, 2022–August 14, 2023
Kolumbastraße 4
50667 Cologne
Germany
Hours: Wednesday–Monday 12–5pm
T +49 221 9331930
mail@kolumba.de
“making being here enough” was what the American artist Roni Horn called the work that we have selected as the point of departure and title of our annual exhibition. In this exhibition we investigate the relationship between place and self with the help of works of art. How do we relate to ourselves—consciously or subconsciously—at particular places and what do these places do to us? At the moment we leave places, have they not already been lost? What happens to them when, following their demise, they are overlaid by new stories? Kolumba itself is the starting point for these questions, making visible its 2000 years of (built) history and multiple reformulations—notably, from church and cemetery to museum and garden.
The pithy quotation captures an ideal: the longing for the here and now, a place without a specific narrative, concept or conventions. The opposite pole is a fundamental principle of the philosophy of antiquity: “Great is the power of memory that resides in places” (Cicero). For what would European culture be without its places? They stand for historical epochs and offer a stage for meaningful narratives, shaping images of the world, creating trends, giving wings to the imagination and anchoring the identity of their inhabitants. And yet these places do not exist just by themselves: they receive their impetus from the deliberate attribution of particular significance, while their continuity depends on a constant updating of their traditions.
The polarity between the freedom a place enjoys as compared with its attachment to its roots is woven into the basic narrative of the prevailing Christian traditions in Europe. On the one hand, Christ’s grave is empty and thus unoccupied. On the other hand, the Christian liturgy is understood as a commemoration, bringing to mind the sites where the history of salvation took place. It was not until Christianity became a state religion in the 4th century AD that the historical sites where the holy story unfolded had to be specifically marked to put collective memory on a sound footing. Each subsequent foundation of a place became inserted into the sequence of this narrative, thus contributing to a tradition of religio (bonding to the sacred). Media which enable these older images to be brought to life include architectures, objects, pictures and rituals. And yet all these are futile without their respective narrative and, above all, the responses from their public.
Such considerations might seem to be at a far remove from the present day. And yet it is these manifold activities aimed at profiling places that are the foundation of our emotional topography. This is shaped by the radical changes in the relationship between place and the self that began with the migration flows of the 19th century: the experience of leaving a place in order to arrive at another is in the first instance one of “displacement”, of “dis-location”. The loss of secure social, political and cultural connections is the existential ordeal of millions of people. Nowadays, many different cultural orientations and heritages are superimposed and interwoven at a place—culture is not uniform, but polyphonic, a meeting point for many collective memories and commemorative communities. What does this mean for us and our places? How important is it to be “here” and what does “here” imply in any case? The year-long Community Project Beau comme un Buren mais plus loin, inspired by a work of art by French artist Éric Baudelaire, takes us out of the museum into the public space of Cologne. Working with young people, we attempt a change of perspective: do “our” themes and the activities we offer equip us to address the diversity of our current society?
With works by Éric Baudelaire, Merlin Bauer, Rudolf Bott, Peter Dreher, Terry Fox, Lutz Fritsch, Eric Hattan, Roni Horn, Bethan Huws, Irmel Kamp, Jannis Kounellis, Norbert Prangenberg, Barbara Probst, Phil Sims, and Ulrich Tillmann, among others.
