NOW—It was, will be and is
December 6, 2025–April 26, 2026
With the exhibition NOW: It Was, Will Be, and Is, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe pays tribute to the work of German video and installation artist Ulrich Bernhardt (b. 1942), one of the important pioneers of media art in Southwestern Germany. The exhibition includes early political graphics, mail art, copy art, video installations, and photographs, thus representing the key groups of works in the oeuvre of the Stuttgart-based artist.
For Bernhardt, art is an open, constantly changing process—a form of philosophical activity. When he was serving as artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, founded in 1978 mainly on his initiative, he coined the term “künstlerische Forschung” (arts-based research) to describe certain forms of subjective experience and knowledge transfer. Unlike science, this type of endeavor does not seek empirical evidence, but combines personal experience with unusual, sometimes absurd methods. The outcomes are aesthetic experiences from which new insights can be gained—insights that have the potential to initiate social change.
Bernhardt's best-known work was created in 1967 while he was studying at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart—a time marked by political activism and the student protest movement. Together with his fellow student Jürgen Holtfreter, he designed the poster Everyone Talks About the Weather. We Don't. for the Socialist German Students' Union (SDS). The poster shows the heads of Marx, Engels, and Lenin on a red background beneath an advertising slogan for the German Federal Railways. Everyone Talks About the Weather. We Don't. became one of the most famous political posters of the 1968 movement, not only in Germany but also internationally. Up to the present day, the poster, whose history and author is little known, has been copied many times and used as a design template.
In 1974, after a brief stint as a television journalist, Bernhardt started to create his first video works. Since the early 1980s, he has been exploring contemporary technologies and social change in connection with Greek mythology. He is particularly interested in how profound technological developments and their consequences influence our minds, and how these fundamental processes can be described using conceptions from antiquity.
The exhibition centers on two installations by the artist from the ZKM‘s collection: The River (1978) and The Sarcophagus (1996/2025). Both works engage with different aspects of time, transience, and duration. The River, Bernhardt‘s first video installation, explores the fleeting nature of time and the constant changes in the way we communicate. The Sarcophagus, on the other hand, addresses the temporal dimension of radioactive radiation, which is beyond the capacity of the human imagination. In this, the artist sees a merging of past, future, and present into an eternal NOW. Against the backdrop of current debates about the use of nuclear power, the work relating to the Chornobyl reactor meltdown in 1986, reminds us of the dangers inherent in nuclear technology that are frequently ignored. Ulrich Bernhardt's exhibition at the ZKM ends on April 26, 2026—the 40th anniversary of this worst nuclear disaster in history to date.
NOW: It Was, Will Be, and Is takes place in the project room of the collection exhibition The Story That Never Ends. The ZKM Collection, where projects related to the ZKM collection and archive are presented. It is also part of a series of exhibitions at the ZKM that pays tribute to a pioneering generation of media artists who are still little known to the wider public. Since 2019, the audiovisual and the mail art archive of Ulrich Bernhardt is housed at ZKM. The restoration of the video installation The River was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Wüstenrot Foundation, project partner of the exhibition.
Curator: Philipp Ziegler
Curatorial assistance: Jelena Matičić
Technical project management: Anne Däuper
Restoration: Marlies Peller, Leonie Rök
Press contact: Lilli Roser, presse@zkm.de / T + 49 (0) 721-8100-1220
Please find further information here.
