Cosima von Bonin: Songs for Gay Dogs

Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean announces Cosima von Bonin's largest exhibition outside of Germany in over a decade.

Populated by animals and cartoon characters, the exhibition Songs for Gay Dogs features recent works alongside new, site-specific commissions, including a monumental installation in the museum’s Grand Hall. This presentation consists of a series of staged scenes that have shaped the artist’s practice since her last major survey in 2014. The German artist Cosima von Bonin (1962, Mombasa) is known for her textile, sculptural and multimedia installations that subvert pop culture icons and luxury industry emblems, staging stuffed animals and everyday objects to reveal the absurdity of power relations and mass consumption.

The exhibition, conceived in close dialogue with the artist, unfolds across the galleries on the first floor and the Grand Hall of Mudam. This journey highlights newly produced works, some of which have never been shown before, alongside a selection of Cosima von Bonin’s iconic textile panels, sculptures and installations. 

A large-scale site-specific intervention, comprising an ensemble of the artist’s sculptures sitting across two giant tables, transforms Mudam’s Grand Hall into a twisted playground. By super-sizing an everyday object, the artist alters our perception of space, offering different perspectives on the museum’s grandiose architecture by Ieoh Ming Pei, as well as on her own work. The exhibition orchestrates a playful and profuse narrative of motifs featuring anthropomorphic marine creatures, cult figures such as Daffy Duck and Bambi, several swings, a slide and a bikini. Cosima von Bonin’s taste for subverting cultural references is reflected throughout the exhibition and is best exemplified by its title, Songs for Gay Dogs, named after a 1963 album by little-known British singer Paddy Roberts. 

Since the mid-1990s, Cosima von Bonin has established herself as a major figure in contemporary art by offering a sharp and humorous perspective on our society through a prolific, multifaceted and collaborative body of work. Numerous and extended collaborations with artists, musicians and filmmakers reflect the collective production strategy claimed by Cosima von Bonin, who continually questions the notion of authorship. The artist’s long-standing interest in experimental electronic music manifests in the exhibition through soundscapes composed by Moritz von Oswald (1962, Hamburg).

A monthly screening programme, the ‘CosiKino’, featuring films chosen by Cosima von Bonin that echo a diversity of themes and motifs present in her work, complements the exhibition. The public programme includes performances by drag queens Mary Messhausen, proddy produzentin and Buzz, that will inaugurate the opening of Songs for Gay Dogs, as well as a rare and intimate concert by Moritz von Oswald that will take place on 8 December 2024.

An associated publication including images of the works and views of the exhibition, an essay by the curator Clémentine Proby, as well as a fictional piece by author Estelle Hoy and never-before-published material from the artist’s archive will offer new perspectives on Cosima von Bonin’s work. Available at the Mudam Store and on mudamstore.com

Curator: Clémentine Proby
Associate Curator: Clément Minighetti