Exhibitions programme 2022

The year at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden starts with a major solo exhibition by legendary filmmaker, artist, and auteur Ulrike Ottinger featuring everything that constitutes her artistic practice—as the first solo project by its directors. Cosmos Ottinger (19 February-15 May, 2022) is entirely dedicated to the imagination of this extraordinary artist and, like a dictionary that defines her languages or an alphabet that deciphers her stories, it turns the pages of her diverse and long-standing oeuvre. Promising feminist and queer waves with voices from the young generation, the Kunsthalle becomes a stage, a film set, a studio, an archive, and a living museum from spring through summer. Photographic images map those places in the world where she has spent her life, while installation elements and sculptural forms illustrate her understanding of bodies. Cinematic formats that reflect her politics of storytelling and political statements in many different forms create interstitial spaces. Selected films will be screened at Baden-Baden’s Moviac cinema.   

The idea of ​​bringing dramaturgy into contemporary art has opened up new dimensions in the repertoire, performative research, and visions of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. As a stitch to last year’s State and Nature, a multi venue project, which extended both terms within the contemporary canon, this year’s survey show is entitled Nature and State (July 9–October 16, 2022) as a dialectic proposal. Through investigating continuity, disobedience, and possible forms of transformation in relation to the state of stateless and the genealogical relationships between future and past, the new chapter peacefully departs from a quote by Ursula Le Quin: “...we have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars.” (The Dispossessed, 1974).

Parallel to the recent manifestation about humanity’s roots in the book, The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, the focus shifts to questioning the main idea of the state as denial of the state of nature considering how prehistoric communities historically made their own decisions of how to live. The exhibition methodology continues the strategy of State and Nature with events and installs in transition—rather than static forms of exhibition making. The artistic projects conceived for their specific forms of interconnectivity and the ways they work with communities, technologies, and creative ideas are by Olga Chernysheva, Will Fredo, Nicole L’Huillier, Robert Lippok, Christof Schäfer, Mohannad Shono and Sorawit Songsayata among others whereas leading names from contemporary theater and performance such as Grada Kilomba and Ersan Mondtag are contributing with large scale projects. 

Autumn will bring performative lenses with sensitive and specific forms of time and movement to the Kunsthalle. Berlin-based artist Jimmy Robert deals with performative research, strategies of staging, relationships between materiality, and object value including the questions on what remains for art history after the performance. In an inspiring, poetic, and strongly political way, Robert revisits the positions of the visitor through the transgressive levels of connecting bodies and spaces. (October 29, 2022–January 15, 2023)

The collaborative artistic research project Robodynamische Diffusion: RDD (Michael Akstaller, Nele Jäger, Oliver Mayer, and Jan St. Werner) will be present throughout the year’s program with sound interventions, spatial intervals, and critical discussions as well as startling off-site events for the global art community. 

For Momentous Editions, which are conceived to foster improved relations between the institution and the artists, we are collaborating with the following artists this year, who are consistent contributors to the program: Alfredo Ceibal, Stelios Kallinikou, Neda Saeedi, Ulrike Ottinger, and Jan St. Werner. Also this year, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden will present new publications including State and Nature, Cosmos Ottinger, Conditions of a Necessity and DAF.

View dates and details here.