Exhibitions 2018

October 27, 2018 – January 13, 2019
Imogen Stidworthy. Dialogues with People
An exhibition by Württembergischer Kunstverein

From October 27, 2018 to January 13, 2019 Württembergischer Kunstverein will host the first solo exhibition in Germany by the British video and film artist Imogen Stidworthy (*1963). With her installations and films, Stidworthy asks how social relationship takes shape when words fail, are unstable, or absent. What other forms of meaning and communication emerge at the borders of language? The exhibition, that is curated by Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, Katia Krupennikova, proposes a new form for presenting media works in which sound and video installations are staged successively. Between exhibition, concert, and cinema screening, a specially created choreography of around one hundred minutes leads the visitor from work to work, around the space.
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May 5, 2018 - September 23, 2018
50 Years after 50 Years of the Bauhaus 1968
an exhibition by Württembergischer Kunstverein
as port of 100 Jahre Bauhaus

On May 4, 1968, one day after students in Paris had occupied the University of Sorbonne and announced the so–called May 68, the exhibition 50 Years of the Bauhaus was opened at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart. The opening was accompanied by protests against the planned closure of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, which was founded in 1953 as a successor to the Bauhaus project. Designed by Herbert Bayer and conceived by Hans Maria Wingler, Ludwig Grote, and the Kunstverein’s director at the time, Dieter Honisch, the exhibition was shown in eight additional museums worldwide until 1971. To this day, it is considered one of the most important postwar exhibitions on the Bauhaus and was of the highest significance in terms of cultural policy for the still-young Federal Republic: since at stake was not least the rehabilitation, at international levels, of Germany as a cultural nation in the aftermath of National Socialism.
Fifty years after the opening of 50 Years of the Bauhaus, the Württembergischer Kunstverein is undertaking a critical rereading of this exhibition. The rereading takes as its point of departure the sociopolitical upheavals of the 1960s and considers the Bauhaus, its historical contexts and the history(ies) of its reception from today's perspective. The idea of the Bauhaus as a self-contained, homogeneous system is to be challenged, as are those narratives that negotiate the Bauhaus and Modernism as unquestioned synonyms of progress, freedom and democracy. Instead, at issue are the ambivalences inscribed in both, as for example with regard to totalitarianism and colonialism.
The exhibition 50 Years after 50 Years of the Bauhaus 1968, which extends over the new and old buildings of the Stuttgart Kunstgebäude (art building), follows four thematic strands, including numerous digressions and byways. They revolve around the role of the Bauhaus in the exhibition and graphic design of the 1920s to 40s; around artistic counter-models to the functional city and consumer society; around the relationships between the avant-garde and the military-industrial complex as well as around perspectives on the concept of multiple Modernisms.
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October 14, 2017 - January 14, 2018
ALEXANDER KLUGE
Gardens of Cooperation
A collaborative project by
La Vierreine Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona and
Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

From October 14, 2017, to January 14, 2018, the Württembergischer Kunstverein is presenting the exhibition Alexander Kluge: Gardens of Cooperation. It is based on the comprehensive exhibition of the same name—devoted to the writer, theorist, and film and television director Alexander Kluge—which was on show at the art center La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona in 2016. In close collaboration with the director of La Virreina, Valentín Roma, and with Alexander Kluge himself, the Württembergischer Kunstverein has developed a reformulation and expansion of this project.

The exhibition’s two main points of reference in terms of content revolve around the metaphor of the garden and the idea of the collective—of cooperation—in Kluge’s oeuvre and modes of operation; and also around forms of emancipation, which are not only the subject of his theoretical and artistic explorations of history, the present, and the future, but with which he himself also tirelessly engages. 

The exhibition in Stuttgart will show a selection of early and more recent short and long films by Kluge, including a specially developed compilation of his so-called “minute films.” In lieu of a chronological or thematic order, the exhibition will explore new and unusual forms of presentation by taking various approaches to Kluge’s narratives. Moreover, Gardens of Cooperation sets out to spotlight and implement transmediality, the motif of repetition, variation, and shifting in Kluge’s work, as well as the principles of montage, constellation, and gravitation.
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