Video Still of a beaver in a domestic interior, standing in front of an almost full coffee pot in a filter machine. Doug Aitken, Sammlung Goetz Munich
Museum Folkwang, Essen

12 Months/12 Films. Explorations in Space

The joint exhibition of the Goetz Collection and the Museum Folkwang takes us on a journey through time and space. Over the course of a year, in monthly rotation, twelve videos and films by major contemporary artists from the Goetz Collection will be presented in the museum’s film room.

Concepts of space are as varied as the term itself. The twelve artists gathered in the exhibition at the Museum Folkwang are not primarily interested in defining physical space. In their videos and films they instead question the function of rooms, explore their limits, crossing these, and create new spaces that are beyond the classical concept of space and time.

The starting point is often the urban space, as in the works of Nira Pereg, Sarah Morris and Francis Alÿs, but here it is a symbol of social and socio-political conflicts. In a theatrical installation, Hans Op de Beeck briefly animates built spaces in a model. In Paris Green, Ed Atkins explores the influence of media images on our conception of space.
In the work of Jesper Just dream, reality and memory come together and create a fictional place that reflects the complex inner feelings of his protagonist. The exhibition 12 Months / 12 Films – Explorations in Space at the Museum Folkwang is designed as a journey that leads to particular places and spaces beyond the traditional notions of space.

Curated by Cornelia Gockel, Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau und Marcel Schumacher

Upcoming

Cyrill Lachauer. The Sunset Route

| Kunstpalais Erlangen

feat. Mike Brodie, Mouse Green, Rhyw, Mia Justice Smith, Moritz Stumm

In the exhibition The Sunset Route, on view at the Kunstpalais Erlangen and created in collaboration with the Sammlung Goetz, Cyrill Lachauer presents works from 2020 to 2025, a period during which he traveled on freight trains through the USA, Mexico, and Bosnia. In the spirit of poetic ethnography, he created photographs and films that are now being shown together for the first time. They all explore questions of freedom, self-determination, and resistance, as well as colonization, exclusion, and exploitation.

 

Laurie Simmons. Dollhouse Photographs

| Deutsches Theatermuseum

The American artist Laurie Simmons is known for her photographs featuring tiny dolls representing stereotypical female roles in domestic interiors. The exhibition, a collaboration between Sammlung Goetz, Deutsches Theatermuseum and Filmfest Munich, presents a selection of works by Simmons that cast a critical gaze at gender stereotypes in the American middle class.

Sterling Ruby

| Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster

Los Angeles-based American artist Sterling Ruby is known for his cross-genre work, which ranges from ceramics and bronzes, collages and textiles, to enormous, spray-painted paintings. In his works, Ruby weaves together a variety of different autobiographical, art-historical, and sociological sources. Through deconstruction and reconstruction, he probes the idea of a non-hierarchical and borderless universe. The exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster provides insight into his multi-layered artistic practice.

 

Jeff Wall

| Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster

Canadian artist Jeff Wall is one of the most influential photographers of our time. In his elaborately staged pictorial compositions, he combines the narrative of cinema with painting. Wall became known for his large-format lightbox images, which are formally more reminiscent of the world of advertising than that of fine art. With this technique, he revolutionized the medium of photography, elevating it to the height of painting and sculpture. The exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster presents a selection of his iconic lightbox images from the 1990s.

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