Politics and Basketball: On the Ground at Munich’s Art Weekend

It’s unusual for an art weekend to begin with a narrowly averted terrorist attack and end with a basketball shootout, but that was what happened at this year’s Various Others, Munich’s response to the city-wide gallery weekend trend.

At the gala dinner, which was in a basketball stadium (more on that later), Michael Buhrs, Various Others board member and head of the Museum Villa Stuck, an institution dedicated to the symbolist Franz von Stuck, expressed heartfelt solidarity with the staff of the Nazi Documentation Center, an arts and education institution on the grounds of the former Brown House, the ex-Nazi headquarters. Amid what should have been a bright couple of days for the center, which is a participant in the annual event (the museum is exhibiting work by sculptor and performance artist Naneci Yurdagül), for two days, the center had remained closed.

On Thursday, an 18-year-old Austrian had fired two gunshots at the institution, hitting the building’s glass façade and its main entrance. The man went on to shoot at the nearby Israeli consulate before he was killed by police gunfire. According to authorities, the date of the attack may have been a motivation for the shooter: Thursday was the anniversary of the 1972 Munich Olympics attack, when a Palestinian terrorist group killed 11 Israeli Olympic team members and a German police officer.

What happened last week prompts a question: what are we ? I find myself winded by the ever-more-terrifying political strife and violence, wondering what chasing down art in towns and cities around Europe means, or whether it is doing any good. And, thankfully, every time, I do get my breath back. One need not look so far.

Critical reflections on the present and the past can be crucial. Last year, artist Tony Cokes presented a critically acclaimed exhibition across two institutions in the city, at Kunstverein Munich and at Haus der Kunst, that looked at the cultural propaganda strategies Germany used post-war to try to brighten its self-image for the 1972 Munich Olympics, an event that ultimately became murderous. This fall at Haus der Kunst, the same bunker under the museum was the site of a brash yet information-packed Pussy Riot retrospective, chronicling the dissident group’s activities diaristically. Despite long-term planning, the museum announced the show the day before it opened due to security concerns.

Various Others, which is a co-production between Munich’s prestigious institutions and its rich cluster of commercial galleries, offers a multitude of proposals for art, as a salve for the times and also a rebuttal, and just about everything between. Truly: artists were sleeping in the project space n.n. all weekend on narrow bunk beds, for one thing. They put their bedding away each day, placing their art back on their top sheets, and were having a late breakfast when I stopped by to see their live-in.

The city-wide art event hopes to bring attention to the art-steeped, collector-rich area, which has, like much of the rest of the art world, been experiencing tougher times (Blue-chip gallery Thomas claimed bankruptcy this summer.) For their part, galleries present new artistic positions by inviting a non-Munich gallery to exhibit with them in their space. The brief can be taken quite liberally, which is fine, because there is nothing worse than trying to wedge too many ideas into a small venue for the sake of it, and real estate is costly in Munich.

At Museum Villa Stuck, a bullet hole in a second-floor window of their space became an uncanny reminder given the recent incident. Tania Bruguera had installed it within her exhibition “The Condition of No,” which considers facets of propaganda and censorship, focusing on the dictatorship in her home country of Cuba. Bullet hole notwithstanding, this show touches another nerve within the recent German political discourse: The artist and activist had had her performance at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin cut off by protesters in February. It was a dark spot within a wider storm taking place in the country’s cultural arena, where rising censorship has become a major concern since the Israel-Gaza war broke out last October.

Given Bruguera’s experience in Cuba (the artist and activist has been arrested more than once), she has a sharp view on this. While that perspective does not always translate as fluently in her art installations, there was a wealth of information to be gained from tear-away sheets available around the exhibition. As part of the show, between January and March 2025, there will be a series of talks that sound needed and promising, looking at boycotts, censorship, and cancel culture. It’s a program that reflects on the vexing present and recent past, asking, refreshingly, a new question: How can we do things differently?

War and geopolitics are considerations that Kosovo-native Flaka Haliti has folded into her practice convincingly. In the ambivalently titled “Partly Cloudy or Partly Sunny” at Deborah Schamoni, Haliti creates new readings of military materials by detangling them from their ideologies by gentle but persuasive juxtapositioning. Heavy bulletproof glass intercuts a large cloud that is suspended delicately within a thick cargo netting. On the wall, Haliti has repurposed bullet-shot glass to both obscure and draw attention to chalk drawings of policy animals. I appreciate her cautious process, which avoids mirroring or repeating the military aesthetics, but rather defangs them via a smart abstraction—it is something that woefully happens too rarely with other artists, for whom fascist references or militaristic imagery can unwittingly become an accent pillow within their work.

But, as I said before, there is the rebuttal and there is the salve. Galerie Meyer Rigger exhibited three works by Sheila Hicks at Rüdiger Schottle that are sublime to look at, their deeply layered threads conjuring a cosmos of depth and color. At Nir Altman, London’s Gathering presented evocative works on paper by Berlinde Brucke and an engraved bench by Jenny Holzer (in unusually colorful marble), which lent further gravitas to the paintings of Emanuel de Carvalho and the work of James Lewis. At Jahn und Jahn, the gallery collaborated with the estate of the formidably talented conceptualist Heidi Bucher; itself a well-thought retrospective worthy of an institution.

At Paulina Caspari, the dealer worked together with New York-based Andrew Dubrow to assemble a meticulous group show, which sees a heterogenous cohort of contemporary painters engaged with symbolism and mythology become anchored within the legacy of the early 20th-century artist Franz von Stuck, “the last prince of art of Munich’s great days.” The foundational stone of the show is a loaned canvas by von Stuck, from 1902; its presence conjures a ghostly, dark ground of spirit that lingers between his easels, which the curators also loaned from von Stuck’s foundation. On these easels are new proposals, and a trance-like mood emerges between Adam Alessi’s gazing untitled figure and the heavy chiaroscuro of Sara Knowland’s two darkened landscapes, largely overwhelmed with the frenetic movement of goats. Vasyl Tkachenko Untitled, 2024, which depicts a figure emerging from a wash of light behind a dark curtain, recalls the heavy contrast in von Stuck’s 1893 portrait Tkachenko holds a similar evocative candor and watchful desire, but is untangled from moralism.

On Saturday, collectors, dealers, artists, and representatives from institutions all gathered in the FC Bayern’s Basketball club. Somewhat miraculously, the Various Others cohort had managed to upload 400 gigabytes of visuals to the team’s LED, touch-sensitive floor. It was a work of art unto itself, in a way, and it heightened the cartoonish fun of the evening. (There were even popcorn boxes emblazoned with Various Others designs on them at the start and soft-serve ice cream later.) Perhaps buoyed by the much-needed levity of the environment, after dinner finished, the entire Munich art world began shooting hoops while music by ’90s rap legend Skee-Lo played.

Haus der Kunst director Andrea Lissoni stood out among the pack with his not infrequent three-pointers and casually perfect lay-ups.  Other art-world players were huffing a little harder; word traveled around the court that Lissoni was once a professional basketball player in Italy.

On one of Bruguera’s tear-away sheets was a line that stuck with me: “Art is not only a statement of the present, it is also a call for a different future, a better one … it is a right not only to enjoy art, but to be able to create it.” This was stated at a 2012 panel on artistic freedom held at the U.N. in Geneva so, in all seriousness, it is good to remember that joy can and must be a part of art’s methodology and, with a good score, a part of the outcome.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com