Preview

Children are the focus of this monumental exhibition that revolves around the thirty video projections of Children’s Games, in which Francis Alÿs (b. 1959 in Antwerp, based in Mexico City) shows playing children from all over the world. For over twenty years, Alÿs has been traveling to places as diverse as Congo, Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Alaska, and Cuba to film children who are completely immersed in their outdoor playing, frequently using materials they have found. While some of the games have long traditions, others have been spontaneously invented by the children in reaction to their surroundings.

Alÿs chose to turn the largest room of the exhibition—known as the “high hall”—over to the children of Cologne. Fifty schoolchildren between eight and thirteen—like the children in the films—will curate a children’s museum and a playing itinerary in this space.

In the exhibition, the artist will present a new film in his Children’s Games series that was made exclusively with local children, driving home the connection between Alÿs’s project and the children’s museum: Kids Take Over.

Curators: Rita Kersting and Santi Grunewald

The exhibition Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly tells the story of an influential yet often overlooked network of five prolific, prominent artists. Although all of them have been recognized as individuals, their strong reciprocal influence, artistic friendships, and romantic relationships have been widely overlooked and rarely studied.

Both individually and as a group, they played central roles in postwar art and made decisive contributions to the history of art, music, and dance with their interdisciplinary work. They continue to inspire generations of artists.

With its focus on the interaction between the five artists, the exhibition also reflects on what it meant to be a gay artist in the 1950s, casting new light on the dynamics of postwar art in the United States and beyond.

This is the first time that Cage’s theoretical influence on Rauschenberg and Twombly, the stage sets by Rauschenberg and Johns for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and the formal and content-related dialogues between Twombly, Rauschenberg, and Johns are the subject of a major exhibition. The perfomative and collaborative dimension of their practices exemplifies their shared cultural conceptions of a nonhierarchical, multipolar, and anti-imperialist society.

Curators: Yil­maz Dziewior, Achim Hochdör­fer with Arthur Fink

In 1890 the US Census Bureau declared the United States fully developed and settled. Leading up to that, Indigenous peoples had been robbed of their lands, railroads had been built in all parts of the country, and the first national parks had been established. That same decade, the first souvenir postcards were produced with color photographs of the US. Using the latest photochrome process, black-and-white negatives were colorized, reproduced on a mass scale, and marketed on the new traveling routes: between New York and Yellowstone, Florida and Chicago, up to seven million postcards were printed every year, creating a view of America that excluded more than it revealed.

De/Collecting Memories begins where the postcard motifs end and examines what they exclude and block out. The purportedly untouched nature depicted in the colorful images constituted the living space and cultural environment of the Indigenous population long before white people made it accessible to tourists and settled it and stipulated what narratives were to be told. The exhibition brings together holdings from the museum's photography collection with the work Sky Dances Light from 2024, an installation of clouds made of tin bells by US-american Indigenous artist Marie Watt (born 1967 in Seattle, Washington).

Curators: Miriam Szwast and Santi Grunewald