May 30, 2026–January 10, 2027
ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe has acquired the Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers Archive, a major archive in the history of television and video art. The exhibition The Television as Gallery: The Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers Archive, on view from May 30, 2026 to January 10, 2027 will present its holdings in the ZKM | Project Room.
In April 1969, works by international avant-garde artists appeared in an unexpected place: on the television screens of German living rooms. Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers had turned television into an exhibition space for art. The Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum did not use television to report on art. It made the broadcast itself the site of the work’s appearance. The project bypassed the exclusive infrastructures of art—museum, gallery, market. The works existed for the duration of the transmission, reached potentially millions of viewers, and were not produced to be owned.
On April 15, 1969, the German public broadcaster ARD aired LAND ART, the first television exhibition. IDENTIFICATIONS followed in November 1970. The productions brought together 28 artistic positions, including Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Jan Dibbets, Gilbert & George, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Richard Serra, and Lawrence Weiner. Additional television interventions by Keith Arnatt and Jan Dibbets appeared unannounced within the regular broadcast schedule. These films and videos are now considered among the most significant works in the fields of Land Art, Conceptual Art, and Video Art.
After public broadcasters refused to continue the collaboration, Schum and Wevers founded the videogalerie schum in Düsseldorf in 1971, the first gallery in Europe dedicated exclusively to the production and distribution of video art.
Preserved by Ursula Wevers for more than five decades after Gerry Schum’s death in 1973, the archive documents the Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum, the videogalerie schum, and Schum’s earlier film projects from 1967 onward. The materials show that these projects were collaborative from the outset: with the participating artists, with Bernhard Höke and Hannah Weitemeier in the early phase, and, from October 1968 onward, with Ursula Wevers, who played a formative role in both the Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum and the later videogalerie schum.
The archive comprises 66 original 16mm films and 81 videotapes in various historical formats and different production stages from completed works to unrealized projects. Also included are audio recordings, correspondence with artists, museums, collectors, and broadcasters, technical documents, production records, photographs, printed matter, certificates, and historical video equipment. Together, these materials document the conceptual, technical, and institutional conditions under which television and video emerged as artistic media.
The acquisition strengthens ZKM’s collection and archival holdings in the field of audiovisual art and media art history. With more than 250 artists’ and theorists’ archives, a video research collection comprising over 30,000 tapes, and dedicated facilities for the preservation of obsolete video technologies, ZKM provides the technical and scholarly framework required to preserve audiovisual archives for future research, publications, and exhibitions.
The acquisition was made possible through the support of the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States [Kulturstiftung der Länder], the City of Karlsruhe, and the State of Baden-Württemberg.
