Exhibitions
ADAS – Autopsie Der Autogerechten Stadt [Autopsy of the Car-friendly City]
In many large German cities, as part of the rebuilding efforts after the Second World War, large inner-city traffic areas were newly installed. From today’s vantage point is it difficult to imagine how these infrastructures and the associated destruction of growing urban spaces were taken to be sensible interventions at the time—and how they were accepted by the society then.
The exhibition shows nine familiar examples, such as the Nord-Süd-Fahrt in Cologne, the Ost-West-Straße in Hamburg, the City-Ring in Hannover, or the overpasses in the centers of Ludwigshafen and Bremen, whose historical genesis in part reaches back to the 1910s. It becomes clear that these are representational spaces of post-war society, with significant cultural structures and new functions for the then emerging service society. A video installation provides insights into the situation today.
A third part is dedicated to Holländischer Platz in Kassel, whose car-friendly reconstruction cut off the university campus and the neighboring street spaces from the inner city. Concrete projects show examples of how to deal with the legacy of the car-friendly city—and how to initiate a comprehensive improvement of the situation.
Exhibition at Neubau ASL, University of Kassel, Department of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture, May 4-25, 2022. Curated by Stefan Rettich
From December 1-19, 2021, the dis_continuities research group, under the direction of Nanne Buurman and Alexis Joachimides, along with students from then Kunsthochschule Kassel, moved into the spaces of the Kassel Kunstverein in order to experiment with forms of addressing and mediating the legacies of the National Social period during this haunting of the Museum Friedericianum. How much did populist-nationalist narratives, networks, and structures from the periods before 1945 or before 1933 influence the documenta and the post-war art business in Germany? How much do the corresponding epistemologies and economies also still haunt cultural and social infrastructures today?
The curatorial experiment was less about presenting research results, facts, or individual artistic works, but about making exhibiting productive as a method for generating knowledge and experiences. Instead of writing off the past, which would allow us to get out of the affair with historical distance, forms were tested out for dealing with the presence of history beyond repression, defensiveness, and self-purifying efforts. We did not siply want to exhibit the undead of anti-Semitism, racism, nationalism, and colonialism, which still make mischief behind the white walls of exhibition institutions and between the lines of art historical narratives. We wanted to face them, for the project of “coming to terms with the present” (Max Czollek) requires us to reflect on our complicity with the ghosts of the past, which continue to live in the social conditions of today.
Exhibition at the Kasseler Kunstverein, December 1-19, 2021
On the occasion of the centenary of the so-called ‘Day of German Art,’ with which the Nazis in Munich opened the “Great German Art Exhibition” and “Degenerate Art Exhibition” on Monday, July 19, 1937, there was a processual exhibition on Monday, July 19, 2021 in the form of a city tour in Kassel. In order to thematize the relationship between the art city of Munich and the documentary city of Kassel, where the documenta was seen as the agent for rehabilitating the modernity alienated as “deviant,” students from the seminar d is for discontinuity: Artistic, Scholarly, and Curatorial Research on National Socialist Continuities at the documenta, under the direction of Nanne Buurman took up the format of the pageant staged by the Nazis. This act of critical appropriation reflects examinations of the appropriation and political resignification of aesthetic, epistemological, architectural infrastructures, which also links this “dmonstration” with the “discussions” and “displays” in our temporary work and exhibition spaces.
Kassel, July 19, 2021.
NACH DER KERNKRAFT [after nuclear power]
Following the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima Daiichi, the Federal Parliament and Federal Council of Germany decided to phase out atomic energy—at the end of 2022 the last German nuclear power plants were shut down. The power stations stand as landmarks in the German river landscapes. The plan is to dismantle the plants on the greenfield land, although only around 3% of the gigantic mass of structures is radioactively contaminated. A timely rethinking of the plan would offer the chance to repurpose some of these inconvenient monuments. Alongside the history and technology of nuclear energy, the exhibition focuses on concrete conversion projects for Biblis, Gundremmingen, and the Elbe locations of Brunsbüttel, Brokdorf, and Krümmel.
Exhibition at ASL Neubau, University of Kassel, July 13–August 15, 2021. Curated by Stefan Rettich.
Human-environment relationships get radically changed due to the intrusions of extractive industries and knowledge technologies. Against this backdrop the exhibition tests out a critical dialogue between contemporary art and museum objects.
Exhibition at the Museum der Kulturen Basel, July 2–October 17, 2021. Co-curation and project direction: Liliana Gómez, in collaboration with the University of Zurich, the University of Kassel, and the documenta Institut.
Research Stations TRACES, A Design/Build Project
Located at Lutherplatz in the center of Kassel, 200 meters north of Königsplatz is the approximately 100 sq m Research Station of TRACES. It has served to facilitate exchange between the university and urban society since 2019, and will continue to do so for a period of five years. Local residents can take part in the teaching and research here. At the same time the site serves as a working space for students and teachers. It also houses pop-up exhibitions, talks, lectures, workshops, seminars, and much more.
2021 – 2026, Kassel. Von Philipp Oswalt, Andreas Buss, Jakob Gebert u.v.a.
Over the course of 2021 Nanne Buurman, Friderike Schäfer, Anna Schäffler, Cornelia Sollfrank, and Antje Wetzel curated Networks of Care at the nGbK (Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst) in Berlin, a platform for exchange about preserving temporary, ephemeral, project-based, or collective artistic and curatorial practices. The platform reflected the political, ethical, and economic implications of different forms of preservation beyond standardization through existing conventions. With the additional goal of developing models for institutional and cultural-political engagement with im/material cultural assets, the platform looked into the framing conditions that would be necessary and meaningful for transmitting knowledge about acting.
nbk, Berlin, January 1–December 31, 2021
It’s a hot potato, that restitution business. The formerly colonized demand the return of the cultural assets that were stolen from them during the colonial era or that entered German collections in questionable ways. The Federal Republic, for its part, argues that it isn’t all quite so simple—and actually rebuilds the old palace of the Prussian rulers who helped write a chapter of the history of colonialism. Renamed in honor of Humboldt, the building is destined to become a repository for those same cultural assets.
Exhibition at KOW, Berlin, November 20, 2020–January 30, 2021
Ecological and social catastrophes caused by humans threaten to make the planet uninhabitable. The situation is critical, and dominated by the interests of capital, architecture and urbanism are ensnared in the crisis. The exhibition shows 21 examples of a new attitude: for the architecture and urbanism of taking care.
The exhibition design translates this fragile situation into a coherent, interactive exhibition display. In addition the spatial situation at the AZW will be used, by means of a temporary installation of plants, to test out whether the temperature of the exhibition space can be maintained better in summer.
Exhibitions at the Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W), Febraury 8–March 12, 2020, DAZ Deutsches Architekturzentrum Berlin, DE February 8, 2020–March 22, 2020, Technische Sammlungen Dresden, DE June 6, 2020-September 13, 2020, VAI Vorarlberger Architektur Institut Dornbirn, AT 28.01.2021 – 30.04.2021, ZAZ Zentrum Architektur Zürich, CH March 25, 2021–August 8, 2021 Curated by Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny. Exhibition design: the next ENTERprise Architects.
The land feeds us and cools the atmosphere. We need it for housing, for leisure, and for work—our economic system is not even conceivable without free access to the land. Since the global financial market crisis, however, the situation has notably changed, and rising rents are out of clearest symptoms of this. But at core, it’s about much more than that. Our social market economy and our community are at stake, and the climate is directly dependent on how we use the land. The exhibition shows 36 central aspects of the land issue, creating cross references to one of the most pressing questions of our time.
Exhibition at the Deutschen Architekturzentrum Berlin (DAZ), September 17-Octorber 25, 2020, since then on tour, including in Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, and Kassel. Curated by Stefan Rettich.
The Martin Niemöller Foundation and the University of Kassel, along with several Potsdam initiatives, have set up a learning site at the Garnisonkirche in Potsdam, which continually provides information about the history of the site and the often ignored and suppressed dimensions of this church, as well the reconstruction project.
Potsdam. Since September 5, 2020, initiated by Philipp Oswalt and Steffen Schuhmann.
In a project seminar on curatorial research, students from the Kunsthochschule Kassel, under the direction of Nanne Buurman, dealt with the parallels between historical practices of lifestyle reforms and today’s slow-and-conscious living trends. In a critical engagement with the political ambivalences of former and present back-to-nature movements, as well and their ideas of immediacy, transparency, and purity, the exhibition in freiheit dressiert // being natural is simply a pose took place from November 18-22, 2019 in the study room in Kassel, employing artistic and curatorial methods to examine the usage of nature and naturalness by (new) right-wing movements and neoliberal sustainability marketing. The exhibition was shown again on November 27, 2019 as part of the Show and Try Again program on the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of the master’s program Cultures of the Curatorial at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig.
November 18-22, 2019, study room Kassel.
Installation View, study room Kassel. Photo: Nanne Buurman.
The exhibition is the first to present women designers who worked in the context of the Deutsche Werkstätten and who, despite their active design and teaching practice and numerous exhibitions, have been forgotten. Women who broke through traditional social paradigms and decisively advanced the reform movement in Germany.
The spatial concept combines all these factors into a chronologically organized, floor-to-ceiling time-space body that allows for different narratives between what is exhibited, the history of the undertaking, and the historical context of society. The time-space body, which is accessible from all sides, is placed in the middle of the exhibition space, allowing visitors to immerse themselves in history.
Exhibition at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, May 17, 2019-August 18, 2019. Curated by Klára Němečková and Tulga Beyerle, exhibition design: the next ENTERprise Architects.
Projects
