Sammlung Goetz at Haus der Kunst

Open End

September 28, 2012 – April 7, 2013

Open End is the fourth exhibition in an ongoing series of presentations of film and video works from the Sammlung Goetz in Haus der Kunst. Featuring the work of 14 renowned international artists, the cinematic works in this exhibition explore the idea of the open narrative with regard to the visual aspect and the use of language. As in the modern and contemporary novel, which constitutes one of the most overt aspects of the literary narrative, freer, open, narrative forms take the place of conventional, linear action towards an end point. Likewise, all the films in this exhibition share the trait of being open ended, thus pointing to affinities between the narrative techniques of the novel and visual structuring of contemporary film installations.

With Emmanuelle Antille, Pierre Coulibeuf, Sue de Beer, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Stan Douglas, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster und Tristan Bera, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, Isaac Julien, Ross Lipman, Laurent Montaron, Clement Page, Ann-Sofi Sidén, Saskia Olde-Wolbers and Yang Fudong.

In House with Pool by Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler several plot lines are consistently pursued in parallel without them ever touching. It is not just the story's finish that is open ended here, but its beginning as well. Furthermore, anything that allows the viewer to infer a chronological sequence remains mere conjecture. A woman waiting in a tidy house; a girl who flees from the same house only to return; and the gardener who retrieves a dead deer out of the pool: each of these forms an individual storyline.
With Montaron, the failure of language is already expressed in the film's title, Balbvtio, which means "stuttering" in Latin. A boy shoots pigeons in an old church and rips off the piece of paper wrapped around one of these pigeons' legs. He translates the text on the paper using a dictionary; the meaning is as clear – or obscure – as concrete poetry. In all of these, the sequence of the events is as loose, and with as many breaks, as a dream.
Together, this selection of works demonstrates that the film director has as many possibilities at his disposal as does the author of a novel with regard to artistic media and narrative techniques. These include the open end, as well as the mix of genres, the framed and episode story, the whole range of narrative perspectives (from the character perspective to the omniscient author, and all hybrids of these), the stream of consciousness as technique, and the variation on a basic theme.

Open End

40 pages, 31 ill., softcover
German
2012, Kunstverlag Ingvild Goetz GmbH, Hamburg
ISBN 978-3939894-00-1
€ 6,00

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Cyrill Lachauer. The Sunset Route

June 20 – September 27, 2026 | 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

June 25 – August 30, 2026 | 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

July 16 – October 24, 2026 | Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster

The American artist Sterling Ruby, who lives and works in Los Angeles, is known for his multi-disciplinary body of work, which includes sculptures, ceramics, bronzes, collages, textiles, and expansive spray-painted canvases in which he intertwines a wide variety of autobiographical, art historical, and sociological sources. Through deconstruction and reconstruction, Ruby explores the idea of a non-hierarchical and borderless universe. The exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster lends insight into his multifaceted artistic practice through a selection of works created between 2008 and 2016.

Jeff Wall

November 17, 2026 – February 20, 2027 | 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.