Arriving at the Munich station, the local dialect settles around me like gentle fog—mostly because I don’t understand a word. As I make my way down the platform, I struggle to squeeze past an endless throng of soldiers, none of them older than 20. My eyes are soon drawn to one towering backpack in particular. I’s already accumulated a number of bright badges. Alongside them, a velcro-ed on name tag simply reads “Kaltwasser.” I’m thinking this can’t quite be real, and, in a moment, I’m all but blinded. The sun suddenly breaks through the clouds to the sound of “Och, wie herrlich!” Here, though presumably not everywhere, life goes on.
Fig.1
Barely have I arrived and the staff of the Kunstverein spirit me away for a tour of the newly opened exhibition. Titled Romeo’s Eyes, the two-person show builds on an ongoing dialogue—not necessarily a collaboration—between artists Simon Lässig and Vera Lutz. In the main hall, I’m greeted by blurry stills that Lässig has lifted from 1970s Hungarian “quasi-realist” films then reprinted on historical analog photographic paper. And, though that might sound rather cerebral, the objects themselves are surprisingly seductive. Obsolete chemicals hovering on the threshold of recognition—something about that I find particularly relatable.
Meanwhile in a darkened room to the back of the building, Vera Lutz delivers a tour de force with The Happiness Experiment (2025). The immersive video installation is projected by eight camcorders with built-in projectors scattered along the walls. The images themselves are pretty banal: flash-lit nocturnal shots skimming an endless succession of objects, maybe from some kind of flea market, or the contents of a backpack emptied on the floor. They’re all there and gone too fast to tell. The real effect is cumulative.
Sometimes a rapid panning shot seems almost to race around the room, sprinting from screen to screen. Other times, the images flicker in concert, like the ripples of raindrops on the surface of the mind. Meanwhile your own footsteps and shadows start to merge with those of the film, as the camera-projectors that recorded the original footage interpellate you into their world of object-images. Could there be a more casual retort to Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror (1977)? It’s so fucking good I let out a little sigh.
Fig.2
Later on, we head over to Jahn und Jahn for a show of new paintings by Remi Ajani featuring strippers and floral still lifes. The implied connection between vanitas and sex work is a bit trying, though the images stay with me all the same. Perhaps because they’re so knowing. On one hand, she chooses subjects whose job is to be seen, but the act of looking at them immediately transplants the viewer into a moral minefield. On the other, Ajani’s is a style that flirts with so many established coordinates of painting—Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Marlene Dumas, even a touch of Luc Tuymans—while still venturing out into a territory uncomfortably its own.
Exhausted from having to give the same tour for what is surely the umpteenth time that day, the artist briskly recounts an anecdote about how she settled on the stripper motif. When she first started thinking about it, she tried to show her sketches to one of her tutors at art school, who refused to look at them at all. That’s when she knew she was on the right track. For her, the reaction to her pole dancers was emblematic of a society with unprecedented access to information, yet people seem allergic to engaging with anything they haven’t signed up for in advance. Outside, I half-jokingly suggest that Ajani’s upside-down women might also have something to do with Baselitz—at which point the handsome gallerist grows visibly unimpressed. I guess that’s enough small talk for now. Back to the chartered BMW.
In the evening, I found myself at a talk on censorship in universities organized by the artists Tania Bruguera and Villa Stück. On one side, there’s Meron Mendel, director of the Anne Frank Educational Centre; on the other, Geraldine Rauch, president of the TU Berlin, who recently drew the ire of German journalists for liking a pro-ceasefire tweet that included an image of protestors carrying a caricature of Netanyahu with a small swastika on his chest. Unfortunately, Mendel could only join via Zoom, which was inevitably plagued by tech problems. So the onus automatically fell on Rauch to deliver a string of well-rehearsed penances, with Mendel weighing in or offering conflicting accounts.
Fig.3
Despite exchanging carefully worded criticisms, both speakers agreed that the most urgent task facing institutions right now is fighting to make sure that spaces for open dialogue remain available. Ultimately, it seemed the biggest threat to universities and students didn’t come from colleagues with odious opinions, or even rowdy campus protests, but from opportunistic politicians and their allies in the press. The audience Q&A was surprisingly anodyne, cordial, even warm. There was a sense that people didn’t care too much about the details of the discussion, but were just grateful for even being allowed to discuss it all. Make of that what you will.
The next day I decided to head out on my own. One must-see event was undeniably the group show Breaking the walls, Dino appears curated by artist Leiko Ikemura at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle. Though the curatorial premise was pretty much just “art about buildings,” the selection and quality of works easily felt like an institutional show. In addition to Ikemura’s own psychologically charged sculptures, another highlight was a photograph by Chen Wei, which I mistook for a work by Thomas Demand until I noticed how a single shadow disrupted the entire image. And, again, another Dan Graham apparition, this time the model for an unrealized work: Two-Way Mirror Bridge and Triangular Pavilion to Existing Mill House for Domaine de Kerguéhennec (1987). Atop a white cardboard landscape, Graham’s corporate glass and steel enclosures almost seem beamed in from outer space, a far cry from the ideal of site-specificity so painstakingly sought.
The otherworldly vibe continued in another two-person show, this time by Thomas Feuerstein and Mona Schulzek at nouveaux deuxdeux. According to the press text, the title SYZYGY refers to the alignment of celestial bodies, though presumably it also recalls the CCRU’s techno-shamanist experiments of the 1990s. Feuerstein’s cycle of drawings from his Metabolica series are engaging for the way they meld the aesthetics of indie comics, scientific diagrams, and sci-fi book covers. Meanwhile, Schulzek’s totemic sculptures, for example, Organic Matter (pill millipedes) (2025) seem like relics of some attempt to construct animal-machine chimeras. Yet, for all their sci-fi inflection, the material choices of both artists’ works seem invested in a vision of the future that’s undoubtedly bygone. It’s easier to imagine them in the interior of a recently renovated plattenbau than the bridge of the Rocinante.
Around 7pm, we start filing into the Festsaal of the Bayrischer Hof—an epic hotel beloved by both Adolf Hitler and Michael Jackson, though only one of the two is commemorated with a literal shrine outside. As the evening progresses, countless guests remark that the interior reminds them of the Titanic. Over dinner, I and a fellow writer limit ourselves to marveling at the excellent organization—shoutout to Lucrezia Levi Crespo in particular—as a local gallerist proudly lays out facts about how consistently the event has grown. He’d be happy to dole out more if it could make the weekend have an even bigger reach. At the end of the day, all his sales were to collectors he already knew.
Fig.4
Downstairs, the crowds waiting in long queues for their risotto grow visibly agitated. Here and there, audible hostilities erupt. From my perch on the first-floor balcony, the well-dressed spectacle below resembles nothing so much as people jostling at aid trucks. Eventually, the staff intervenes to inform us in no uncertain terms that the free drinks are over, I repeat, the free drinks are over. Time to disembark and appreciate some art.
The extravaganza programmed under the title Too Soon to Say—The Unconference is overwhelming to say the least. Scattered throughout the hotel’s countless rooms, there isn’t just the standard program of panels, presentations, and talks; there are also performances, concerts, screenings, installations, most taking place at the same time. One might find special glasses by Lea Vajda, or a guided workout by The Chicks on Speed Experience, all while a green-face Olga Hohmann exorcizes the ghosts of the Munich Security Conference. There’s even a textile-dyeing workshop by Philip Huang, not to mention a karaoke bar by Sam and Hilary Lui, at which the event’s charismatic director, Christian Ganzenberg, personally welcomes guests and solicits donations in exchange for signature cocktails. I struggle to sit still for long. The crowds make it impossible to see much of the presentations, and the scheduled events already have queues twenty minutes before they even start. Instead, I let myself be carried along by the surge of intoxicated small talk flowing everywhere and nowhere all at once.
There is one place I keep returning to throughout the night, though: suite 725. Here, Alex Hunter’s site-specific AI film Close Enough (2025) is presented on two floors, and it’s the work that sticks with me the most. Onscreen, I follow an attractive cast of characters through a succession of hotel rooms—some of them, I swear I’d been in just moments before. Illuminated by glaring lights, every shot has the feel of a party photo. The cast lounges shirtless in the jacuzzi, reclines glamorously on the bed, and dances with strippers, this time male. The more obvious AI effects only underscore a sense of the glib fakeness that was always already there. A similarly artificial voiceover serves up advertising slop that strikes a delicate balance between existential and banal: “You don’t belong here/but coincidentally you are here/so you just go/with the flow.” Needless to say, I feel seen.
Back in real life, one of the more memorable figures from the video—who turns out to be Hunter’s partner—is making sure that the guests have no shortage of refreshments, all consistently served up with an ironic grin. Suddenly, I feel an acute sense of vertigo, as though I’m trapped in a hall of mirrors or a mise en abyme. I sink into the soft sofa, thank god it’s there. As the disorientation settles, I realize there’s also something cathartic in having the ridiculousness of your contradictions fed back to you in the guise of someone else.
//
- Images:
Cover: Alex Hunter, Close Enough, 2025, (still);
Fig.1: Simon Lässig, In a room of 497 × 239 cm, each wall measuring 250 cm in height, a window of 146 × 134 cm on the left wall, a door of 111 × 200 cm on the wall facing me. Being without motion, I look at the other, measure myself against every movement they make, for I see what they see and see it as they see it: without colour, as angles and distances, 2024. Courtesy the artist, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna, and LC Queisser, Tbilisi;
Fig.2: Remi Ajani, Still Life, Jahn und Jahn, Munich 2025 © the artist, courtesy Jahn und Jahn, München/Lisboa;
Fig.3: Leiko Ikemura, Haus-Frau, 1991, Edition 3/5, VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2025;
Fig.4: Mona Schulzek, Extraterrestrial stone (27°57.5’N 21°41.0’E), 2024. Courtesy, nouveaux deuxdeux.
