New Director: Yilmaz Dziewior
Museum Ludwig
Heinrich-Böll-Platz
50667 Cologne
In February 2015 Yilmaz Dziewior will become the new director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
“With Dr. Yilmaz Dziewior an internationally recognized figure will become director of the Museum Ludwig, one who unites different cultures within himself, brings a wealth of experience from his many years as a successful curator and museum director, and is closely connected to Cologne, the urban region along the Rhine, and the museum itself,” says the City of Cologne’s Deputy for Art and Culture Susanne Laugwitz-Aulbach. “His vision for the Museum Ludwig will lend the institution new brilliance.”
The mayor of the City of Cologne, Jürgen Roters, appears very pleased that Yilmaz Dziewior, an outstanding expert in and authority of contemporary art, will take over the direction of the Museum Ludwig. Hence his appointment was also agreed to in a broad consensus with the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation and the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at the Museum Ludwig. “I’m very delighted that we have succeeded in quickly finding such a prestigious successor for Philipp Kaiser. The Museum Ludwig can thus look forward to an exciting further development.”
Since 2009 Dziewior has directed the Kunsthaus Bregenz (KUB), which plays a leading role in the organization of contemporary art exhibitions in Europe. As commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion, Dziewior will curate its contribution at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Prior to his professional engagement in Bregenz he was the director of the Hamburg Kunstverein for eight years and concurrently served as professor of art theory at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts.
Dziewior is very familiar with his new working domain. From 1996 to 1999 he worked for the Museum Ludwig in a freelance capacity. As curator there he realized a project in 1997 featuring works by Sarah Lucas and in 1999 was responsible for organizing the contemporary portion of the exhibition Kunstwelten im Dialog: Von Gauguin zur globalen Gegenwart (Art worlds in dialogue: From Gauguin to the global present).
Dziewior’s texts appeared regularly in Artforum (New York), Camera Austria (Graz), and Texte zur Kunst (Berlin). He has edited over 50 books and catalogues on art of the 20th and 21st centuries and has contributed writings to catalogues for such institutions as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
His work is distinguished by a dedicated interest in social issues, whereby his exploration of identity-political and cultural attributions should be emphasized here. Against this background he has increasingly focused on artists from Africa (Bodys Isek Kingelez, Pascale Marthine Tayou), Latin America (Diango Hernandez, Cildo Meireles, Gabriel Orozco), and Asia (Ai Weiwei, Danh Vo, Haegue Yang) in large solo exhibitions.
Yilmaz Dziewior uses an interdisciplinary approach, which is particularly evident in his exhibitions and projects dealing with architecture (Arno Brandlhuber, raumlabor Berlin, Kuehn Malvezzi, Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz) as well as theater and dance (René Pollesch, She She Pop, Yvonne Rainer). A fundamental premise of his approach is the analysis of the context at hand, which is reflected in both his experimental platform of the KUB Arena in Bregenz and in his exhibition and event series Inserts for the Hamburg Kunstverein.
In the last 15 years Yilmaz Dziewior has collaborated on large solo exhibitions, among other projects, with Yael Bartana, Cosima von Bonin, VALIE EXPORT, Harun Farocki, Andrea Fraser, Wade Guyton, Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy, and Ed Ruscha. Among the group exhibitions he has curated are Formalismus. Moderne Kunst / Formalism. Modern Art, today, heute, This Place is My Place—Begehrte Orte (Desired Spaces), Wessen Geschichte (Whose history), So machen wir es: Techniken und Ästhetik der Aneignung (This is how we’ll do it: techniques and aesthetics of appropriation), and Liebe ist kälter als das Kapital (Love is colder than capital).
