Summer program 2024

forms of the surrounding futures: Rodrigo Hernández, Agnė Jokšė, Tarik Kiswanson, Esse McChesney, Rasmus Myrup, Ania Nowak, Luiz Roque, Ana Vaz
May 4–August 4, 2024
Kunsthalle Münster, Hafenweg 28, 48155 Münster

forms of the surrounding futures responds to the current state of permanent crisis by embodying and celebrating plural narratives beyond a normative dominance for a tomorrow in the exhibited works and performances. The exhibition bypasses prevailing paradigms that uphold the status quo and anticipate possible futures to conceive of our present time as a moment of transformation full of potentiality. An expanded notion of “queer” forms the starting point for questing prevailent paradigms and power structures and rethinking and reshaping the construction of bodies, spaces, and times. Learn more.

Curated by João Laia in dialogue with Merle Radtke

Paul Spengemann: spin jump crawl climb dream bite hunt
June 27–June 30, 2024
Sporthalle Berg Fidel, Am Berg Fidel 51, 48153 Münster

Paul Spengemann creates creatures and has them tell stories. For his new work he has created a character that is moving into the Berg Fidel sports hall during the FLURSTÜCKE festival. While, normally, basketball or volleyball Bundesliga matches take place there, attracting thousands of visitors with a lot of action and commotion, it is now an eight-legged creature that invites them to visit the huge hall during the off-season. The sports hall and its specific environment become a projection surface for Spengemann’s laser show, for which he translates animations into simple line constellations, creating a rather distinctive visual world—a dreamscape which at the same time relates to the perturbed world as it exists here and now. Learn more.

Curator: Merle Radtke

Silke Schönfeld: No More Butter Scenes
June 27–June 30, 2024
Kreativ-Haus, Diepenbrockstraße 28, 48145 Münster

Silke Schönfeld's video installation No More Butter Scenes, on view in the context of the FLURSTÜCKE festival, is about intimacy, consent and transgression in the context of the acting profession. It plays with the tension-laden space between the fiction we experience on the big screen and the staging of the actors as (supposedly) private individuals. In the film, the authenticity of the interviews is gradually deconstructed, while the protagonists increasingly disregard the rules set out in the invisible script. The verbal exchange of blows between them evolves on the physical level into a mixture of dance and combat. While we are being thrown back on our own prejudices, the roles of victim and perpetrator are constantly renegotiated between the actors. What role do the protagonists’ ambitions play? How high is the risk that one’s own ambitions will lead to complicity in the structural abuse of power? Learn more.

Curators: Daniel Huhn and Merle Radtke

Ludger Gerdes: Synkategomerata
July 10–September 15, 2024
Stadthausgalerie Münster, Platz des Westfälischen Friedens, 48143 Münster

In 1987, German artist Ludger Gerdes realized his first large site-specific work for public space, Schiff für Münster as part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster. In a sparse field on the outskirts of the city, the artist excavated a small plot of land and constructed  an artificial, moat-encircled island in the shape of a canal barge pointing directly at the city’s three primary religious institutions. The exhibition Synkategoremata explores Gerdes’ critical investigation of institutions and the subjects that constitute them. It departs with a term—used to title a series of watercolours from 1985—that, in logic and language theory, refers to words that only derive their propositional meaning through its use in relation to others. Celebrating what would have been the artists’ 70th year, this exhibition brings together six bodies of work and unpacks the way in which Gerdes conceptualised the production of meaning in the public sphere, as a negotiation of artistic, architectural, linguistic and social relations. Learn more.

Synkategoremata is realized in close collaboration with the Künstler:innenarchiv der Stiftung Kunstfonds.

Curators: Matthew Hanson and Merle Radtke