Program 2026: The Puzzle’s Pulled Apart

The year-long research, exhibition, and discourse program The Puzzle’s Pulled Apart explores how language is embodied and carried by voices, shaped by ideologies and power, yet always capable of generating new ways of inhabiting and expressing the world. Inspired by a line by poet Fanny Howe (1940–2025)—"the puzzle’s pulled apart becoming tattered and stranded"[1]—the program gestures toward strategies of dissecting and reconfiguring linguistic material to reveal ambiguity. To pull apart the puzzle is therefore also to listen for the embodied rhythms and resonances of language, attending to how it exceeds semantic function and becomes affective, performative, and plural. 

Building on these ideas, the 2026 program unfolds across three exhibitions—by Julia Heyward, Steffani Jemison, and Sanna Helena Berger—accompanied by the performance series Écris-toi!, write your self! and the conversation series Imprint.

[1] Fanny Howe (2010), Walk to Work. In: Emergence. East Sussex: Reality Street, 35–40, 37.

Exhibitions

Julia Heyward: Voices of Many Voices
March 7–May 31, 2026
Opening: March 6, 6pm
Performance together with Perry Hoberman: March 7, 6pm

Artist and performer Julia Heyward (b. 1949) describes her use of language as "convoluted, associative, delirious, and didactic,"—a means of triggering emotion through excess, disruption, and play. Drawing on vaudevillian theatre, slapstick, yodelling, Mongolian throat singing, ventriloquism, and diverse forms of phonetic distortion, Heyward developed a distinctive theatrical aesthetic. Voices of Many Voices highlights Heyward’s early performances, which frequently incorporated superimposed projections, live music, props, and costumes, migrating fluidly between spoken word, concert formats, and theatre. Rather than being bound to a single medium, her practice unfolded across formats, extending a sustained cross-media exploration of language, sound, and image.

Despite the radical subjectivity of her voice and profound influence on New York’s underground art scene in the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond, Heyward’s work has received little institutional recognition. Voices of Many Voices now seeks to address at least one aspect of her pioneering work: the manipulation of language and modulation of voice. This presentation and Miracles in Reverse at Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft (31.1.–19.4.2026) mark Heyward's first institutional exhibitions outside the United States. Both exhibitions feature a scenography developed by Celeste Burlina and are accompanied by a video and film program, curated by Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff. The accompanying research for both projects in Nuremberg and in Münster will be incorporated into a joint monographic publication on Heyward’s work, to be published in summer 2026 by Mousse Publishing.

Steffani Jemison
June 27–September 20, 2026
Opening: June 26, 6pm

The point of departure of Steffani Jemison's (b. 1981) solo exhibition is the 'language of the birds,' a phrase used across diverse spiritual and mythological traditions to describe a divine and perfect language available only to the initiated. Jemison’s new installation connects closely to her long-standing interest in flight as both a symbolic and bodily experience of transcendence and suspension, as well as to her engagement with language—specifically the question of how speech, text, and gesture function to express and obscure. 

Jemison will also develop a new iteration of Flight Theater, first presented in 2025 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, in close collaboration with writer Quincy Flowers. Flight Theater is both a performance and an ongoing practice that formulates a poetic, multi-layered reflection on our longing to escape the earth—figuratively and literally. Flight Theater will undergo a significant development in Münster and is currently planned for additional presentations in adapted form at The Kitchen in New York (2026–27).

Sanna Helena Berger: Œuvre (working title)
October 17, 2026–January 17, 2027
Opening: October 16, 6pm

Œuvre (working title) is Sanna Helena Berger's first institutional solo exhibition in which she opposes the retrospective format as the sealing of an artist’s life. Against tradition, Berger suggests that looking back at an artist’s body of work only at the end eliminates their agency for midway meaning-production (German: Nachträglichkeit). This interpretation of an archival gesture looks both backwards and forwards.

Berger lets the usually temporary placeholder "working title" remain as an eponymous echo of her philosophy; a life’s work is a non-linear process. The exhibition becomes a site which emphasizes the prefix re- as a deictic method, letting both finished and abandoned works point towards new and revised interpretations of what has already been. A critical turn where Berger attempts to re-member, re-visit, and re-assemble works with a reflexive critical gaze, letting re-contextualization become a formal method which informs the curatorial gestures of the exhibition.

Event series

Écris-toi!, write your self!
Performance series 
February–December 2026

"Woman must write her self (…)"—so wrote French philosopher Hélène Cixous in her essay, The Laugh of the Medusa (1975) [2]. Here, writing is positioned as a transformative force, inseparable from its political and corporeal dimensions rooted in female desire. Echoing Cixous‘ imperative, Écris-toi!, write your self! is a performance series for which artists will be commissioned to produce new texts and performances that use language, voice, and body as means of aesthetic and political articulation. 

[2] Hélène Cixous (1976), The Laugh of the Medusa, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4, 875.

Imprint
Conversation Series
May–December 2026

Imprint is a conversation series focusing on publishers, bookstores, and publication projects initiated and run by artists. The title derives from the English term 'imprint', referring to both a colophon, an inscription at the end of a book giving details about its production, as well as a lasting trace or impression. Through talks, readings, and book presentations the conversation series continues the Westfälischer Kunstverein's tradition of publishing.

More events will be announced over the course of the year. For further details on the program, please feel free to contact our press office, visit our website, or sign up for the newsletter.

Director, Curator: Theresa Roessler / Assistant Curator: Vivien Kämpf