Performing the Public Collection of Hamburg
August 1, 2025–December 31, 2027
City Curator Hamburg has the pleasure to announce a new series of projects titled Counter Monuments. Performing the Public Collection of Hamburg (2025-2027).
Hamburg is known as a place where monuments have become counter monumental, leading to the creation of counter-monuments. The title of our new series and its art historical term originates from the Hamburg Dammtor monument ensemble, where various histories and ideologies are both in dialogue and in a tension. Meantime many stunning artworks of the city's public art collection seem forgotten or obliterated. What could they tell us today, what do they stand for, how can we relate to them in a post-migrant society?
The series of City Curator projects Counter-Monuments. Performing the Public Collection of Hamburg features ongoing artistic activations of Hamburg's fascinating public art collection. Artistic interventions are accompanied by
a work of care, restoration and maintenance of the sites together with the Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media, such as, the recently restored, remarkable Monument Against Fascism by Esther Shalev-Gerz and Jochen Gerz, inaugurated in 1986.
At the core of the invited projects lies the question of how to critically, sensitively and timely engage with the public sphere in which many different voices and experiences can be seen and heard in a multidirectional manner. Many of Hamburgs counter-monuments have raised the questions of how to live an anti-fascist life, something to be asked today again and again. Since monuments themselves do not remember anything, it is for us, humans, to express, affirm, and problematise our values with and against them.
Program and places:
October 2025
Performative activation and restoration of the Monument against Fascism (1986–1993) with Esther Shalev-Gerz in Hamburg-Harburg. The restoration was carried out by Markus Lohmann and accompanied by a multilingual reading by students from the neighbouring Tàimakoo association, a walk with Eda Aslan, and a dinner prepared by Salah Zater at the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof.
A Song for Esther by Candice Breitz at Kampnagel Hamburg. Featuring Aeham Ahmad, Chicks on Speed / Jeremiah Day, Daniel Kahn, Dejan Jovanović and Oana Cătălina Chiţu, Die Anstalt, Dornika, Ebow, Ensemble Lebedik, Joram Bejarano and Kutlu Yurtseven of Microphone Mafia, Lie Ning, Lili Sommerfeld, Malonda, Peaches, Polly Ott, Rasha Nahas, Sialan String Quartet.
August 2025
Here + Now + Everyone by Chto Delat International at the Here and Now monument (1976) by Gloria Freedmann.
October–December 2025
Exhibition FASIA by Ina Wudtke in collaboration with Millicent Adjej and ARCA e.V. at the Fasiathek.
The upcoming editions of the Counter-Monuments series feature works by:
Luchezar Boyadijev, Liz Rech, Pınar Öğrenci, Maryna Tomaszewska, Clara Laila Abid Alsstar, Inglam, and many more.
The City Curator is an independent curatorial format for public art that was initiated in Hamburg in 2013 and has seen several follow-up editions in other cities. Since 2024, Joanna Warsza is the new City Curator of Hamburg, and the project is since hosted at Kunsthaus Hamburg.
We thank our partners and supporters of the Counter-Monuments series:
Kampnagel Hamburg, Internationales Sommerfestival Kampnagel, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Tàimakoo e.V., ARCA e.V., fluctoplasma & Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung and many others.
