During the day, the Marienplatz is unbearably overcrowded. Tourists drag wheeled suitcases toward the S Bahn. Cleaners in orange uniforms smoke beside delivery entrances before another shift begins. Luxury stores maintain their liturgical glow. On a windy sunny morning earlier this month I stood with a coffee and a pistachio croissant in front of the eleven monitors that the artists Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader inserted into the circulatory passage in the iconic square. They do not disrupt the passage so much as catch what it lets fall out of focus. Their animations, tracing the development of American Sign Language, unfold inside historical vitrines once designed for commercial displays. The work gains force from this placement, where language appears shaped by infrastructure itself.
Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader presenting “ABC (Always Be Communicating)” for Public Art Munich, Focus Year 2026.
This infrastructure is maintained and celebrated through the Focus Year for Public Art Munich, which distributes six projects across the city as parallel readings of the public sphere. The themes range from water infrastructures of the Isar river to trees as carriers of memory, from football activism to self-organized remembrances of racist and anti-Semitic violence, as well as to the histories of sign language’s global circulation. For “ABC (Always Be Communicating)” Kim and Mader select one word per letter of the ASL alphabet from the pioneering etymological dictionary by Emily Shaw and Yves Delaporte and translate these into abstract animations of transformational grammars. Around the screens, commuters continue moving quickly through the corridor without looking up for very long. With the return of the art weekend Various Others (VO) the city’s own thresholds of attention become briefly visible again.
Cem A, Untitled (Elephant in the Room), PVC, 2026 © VO Vectors, Bayerischer Rundfunk.
Another moment: at Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), Bavaria’s public-service broadcaster, where Cem A presented a pilot version of a longer unfolding project, Double Bind: On Reality, curated by Hans-Lennart Wiesner for the VO “Vectors” program. The format builds on Cem’s ongoing series “Crit Club” and on the meme logic of his account @freeze_magazine, where institutional language, internet irony, and systems analysis circulate in the same compressed visual field. Inside the BR’s lobby, a life-size, transparent, inflatable elephant lies on its side, legs splayed. The work is titled The Elephant in the Room. It reads literally, like a spatial meme anchored to a joke that does not resolve into commentary but remains suspended in the atmosphere as we pass into the hall where Dr. Niclas Broer, a plastic surgeon, and Julia Barthel, a journalist, answer identical questions while wearing headphones that prevent them from hearing each other. Behind them, a live co-occurrence system tracks overlaps in vocabulary and rendered speech as shifting constellations of alignment and divergence. The moderator, trained in the controlled cadences of public broadcasting, held the frame together through an anodyne tonal stability, even as meaning drifted laterally. What emerged was less a network than its simulation: language producing the appearance of connection while failing to generate shared ground. Rather than opening communication, the system made visible how even highly structured dialogue collapses into parallel monologues, a condition now arguably surpassed by machine-based models that can simulate relationality without requiring it.
Christian Ganzenberg speaking to guests during the opening night of Various Others at the foyer of Lenbachhaus Munich. Photo: AWC.
A contrasting image: the opening of Various Others in the foyer of the Lenbachhaus. The foyer is already packed when I arrive. It recalled the early years of Gallery Weekend Berlin, before expansion and speculation turned spontaneity into obligation. People still seem genuinely curious here, even when curiosity is shaped by familiar circuits between locals and visiting guests. Christian Ganzenberg’s speech is calm, humble, and joyful, even though he seems wildly busy doing everything as VO’s director. Sustaining this fragile ecology through years when Munich struggled to present itself culturally, beyond inherited wealth and administrative prestige, seems like an impossible mission but Ganzenberg handles it admirably. This year, Various Others defines its tone by embracing proximity itself, and the fact that it operates best through repetition, overlap, and long memory. In Munich, everyone collaborates with everyone, producing warmth as well as exhaustion, an economy of soft dependence that holds the scene together even as it limits how far it can step outside itself.
Kate Newby, anything, anything, 2024. Photo: Robert Hamacher, © Courtesy Kate Newby und Art: Concept, Paris.
Museum Brandhorst offers a good example of how to accomplish this feat. The museum no longer presents itself as a closed ensemble of preserved works but as a carrier of the embedded histories of the neighborhood. “Carrying”, curated by Franziska Linhardt, activates Cy Twombly’s Lepanto Room, the Türkentor, and the surrounding spaces of the Kunstareal as sites where cultural display intersects with martial memory. The former Prinz-Arnulf-Kaserne, once home to Ottoman prisoners of war and later inscribed into the Türkenstraße, anchors this geography. Works by Louise Lawler and Kate Newby extend these entanglements within and around the façade, where meaning shifts through location, exposure, and ongoing transmission. Gürsoy Doğtaş reframed Türkenstraße as a linguistic monument to exclusion, asking what it means for generations of Turkish Germans to move daily through streets named after historical violence. Cana Bilir-Meier approached the racist absurdities surrounding the term “Gastarbeiter” (guest worker) through collective rehearsal and song. Leyla Yenirce layers portraits of women fighters, writers, filmmakers, and activists into fragmented constellations accompanied by sound compositions tracing grief and resistance. Refreshingly, the museum no longer feels sealed into postwar Western certainties.
Leyla Yenirce, 28.01.2026, 2025. Foto: Gunter Lepkowski, © Leyla Yenirce, Courtesy the artist und Capitain Petzel, Berlin.
Milena Muzquiz’s range of visual reference grows out of Tijuana’s souvenir shops, beaches, and fragmented leisure fantasies, where shells, flowers, and tropical signs accumulate until pleasure itself begins to feel overproduced. From a distance, her ceramic bodies and paintings, presented by Rüdiger Schoettle and Travesía Cuatro, immediately recall the sculptural logic of Mike Kelley, under whom she studied in Los Angeles. Despite the precision of their display, the works remain unstable, excessive, slightly beyond psychological control, carrying border economies, tourist aesthetics, ecological pressures, and decorative appeal without resolving them into narrative clarity.
Milena Muzquiz, Fragment from All access 1, 2024, oil on canvas, 134.5 x 134.5 cm, at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle in collaboration with Travesía Cuatro. Photo: AWC.
Upstairs, Elif Saydam builds another system of instability, where ornament manifests a form of material fatigue. Their paintings are driven by the instability of disposable surfaces, materials that break down, stain, and shift through light exposure. The decorative logic becomes inseparable from erosion. Their photographs—sculptures in a way—feel closer to processes of decay than to image-making in any stable sense of the term. Their accompanying text expands this condition through narrative drift, beginning with the story of Anthony E. Pratt, the inventor of Cluedo, and moving on to hotel lobbies and war factories, where entertainment and violence are held inside the same occupational hand. Read alongside Muzquiz, Saydam’s work withdraws from the seduction of ornament at the exact moment it produces it.
Ilit Azoulay, Future Ancestors No. # 17, 2024. © LOHAUS SOMINSKY and the artist.
Ingrid Lohaus collaborates with Mennour Paris for a dialogue between a huge polished volcanic stone by Alicja Kwade and a series of collages by Ilit Azoulay. Both are connected to celestial forms, but the actual protagonist here is the discreet surroundings created by Azoulay, who treats the archive as a site where images function as epistemic units rather than as illustrations of pre-existing knowledge. Her collages bring together ritual objects, scientific imagery, planetary photography, and technological debris without organizing them into a single interpretive frame. Meaning emerges as a consequence of how images are positioned in relation to one another, revealing knowledge itself as a construct produced through visual adjacency and displacement. A healing object placed beside a satellite image does not resolve into symbolism, it exposes the gap between different systems of knowing. We might have entered Gemini season but for Azoulay’s practice, the stars look different on her opening night, and she allows herself to enjoy them beyond hierarchy or synthesis.
Ilit Azoulay, Film still from the video work MARY, 2025–2026 © and courtesy of the artist.
Villa Stuck extended Azoulay’s inquiry into the conditions under which identity becomes legible as knowledge. The exhibition returned to the inherited narratives surrounding Franz von Stuck and his descendants, treating them less as biographical details than as a system through which self-representation is continuously constructed. The villa appears as a layered epistemic space where domestic objects, institutional display, and private mythology coexist as complimentary forms of evidence. Azoulay works through fragments of testimony, archival images, and interrupted speech that circulate without resolving into a unified account. A recorded sentence remains with me: “Looking back, I wish I had been the author of my own story, not merely its subject.” Read within Azoulay’s framework, the statement functions less as confession than as an expression of how authorship itself is distributed across archival arrangements. What emerges is not a recovered narrative but a demonstration of how knowledge about the self is assembled, edited, and stabilized through visual and spatial systems.
Anousha Payne, Flap against the roof of my mouth, 2026, watercolour, wax, pine resin, oil pastel,chalk pastel, natural pigments, and dyes on stretched cotton, 210 x165 cm, photo by Sebastian Kissel © Sperling.
The 2026 VO Award for galleries, valued at 5,000 euros, is split between Galerie Sperling and Max Goelitz, an outcome that sits slightly askew to expectations for a single winner, given the limited number of participating galleries. The jury, composed of Margherita Belcredi, Kolja Reichert, Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, and Lisa Zeitz, describes collaboration, diversity, and fresh perspectives as their guiding criteria, yet these circulate here less as imperatives than as a vocabulary that accompanies the works without ever fully containing them. The split prize reads as a procedural adjustment to a field of activity that does not easily condense into a single exemplary position. The award remains small enough to behave like an annotation within the festival structure, closer to observation than to the establishing of a hierarchy.
Ushara, Performance for “Triangle reshapes the O of my mouth”. Photo Pablo Lauf © Sperling.
At Sperling, Anousha Payne developed, with Ushara and Kitty Doherty, “Triangle reshapes the O of my mouth”, an exhibition and performance unfolding around the mythological layers of the life of a moth. Proximal to an evaluative vocabulary without submitting to its priorities, clay bodies retain seams, compression lines, and irregular fractures from drying. Glaze collects in recesses where gravity has accumulated materials over time. Pigment sinks into ceramic surfaces during firing, leaving color as the trace of process rather than as a distinct applied surface. Folkloric fragments, bodily mutation, devotional craft, and ecological residue are among the elements that appear as conditions embedded in the making process. They are held together through the dynamics of weight, touch, and duration.
Ushara’s contribution extends the work into sonic space. Breath breaks before coalescing into tone, vocal lines fracture under pressure, repetition operates as rhythm without seeking resolution. Operatic phrasing appears in fragments, dissolving across registers before it can form a consistent address. Sound spreads unevenly across the room, collecting in corners, thinning out near thresholds, returning with a delay that alters duration itself. Silence registers as a shift in spatial density.
Eva Hesse, No Title, 1960, Oil on Masonite. Photo: The Estate of Eva Hesse, Courtesy Hauser und Wirth, Photo: Jon Eyer.
At Max Goelitz, Eva Hesse is placed within a curatorial arrangement centering notions of dialogue, lineage, and generational proximity. Color spreads with uneven elasticity across surfaces that resist figurative stabilization; forms develop without asserting compositional authority; humor and impatience remain embedded in material handling rather than interpretation. For the show Lukas Heerich reworks the former Acne Studios space, exposing structural layers of steel, concrete, and light. The gallery in this format stops reading as a neutral container and begins to operate as a spatial condition already in motion, where reflection, shadow, and industrial texture participate in the dynamics of display. Hesse’s works are not framed by architecture so much as caught within its shifts of exposure. The proximity to works by Heerich and Rindon Johnson produces a temporal compression that avoids narrative alignment. Institutional vocabulary continues to circulate, while attention reorganizes itself at a slower and less legible pace.
Exhibition view of Sandra Vazquez de la Horra: Soy Energía. (14.11.25 - 17.5.26)
When Elke Buhr described Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s exhibition at Haus der Kunst as “spiritual” the phrase sounded somewhat inflated. On viewing the works, however, the drawings began operating at a different psychological register altogether. Figures emerged from waxed paper through graphite, stains, and compressed narrative fragments that carried erotic fear, Catholic symbolism, Indigenous cosmology, and political violence simultaneously. The rooms slowed people down. Visitors stopped checking their phones. A collector near the entrance quietly started crying (while pretending to examine the work list). Vásquez de la Horra achieved something rare: her works generated inward pressure without overt theatrical manipulation. Spirituality appeared here as an aspect of material discipline shaped through repetition, vulnerability, and proximity to death. One left carrying the images inside the body rather than forming conclusions inside language.
Portrait of Authentically Plastic. Photo: Ryan Molnar. Courtesy of Haus der Kunst
Andrea Lissoni continues transforming Haus der Kunst through lightness of curatorial touch rather than symbolic confrontation. This matters enormously inside a building still carrying the architectural muscle memory of fascism. Its collaboration with Ritournelle for “Tune” unfolded through sound, moving images and performances by artists like Nkisi, Tikiman and Blawan that dissolved the space’s monumental rigidity without pretending history could be wished away. People sat on floors, teenagers wandered through rooms beside retired couples. Somebody appeared to sleep quietly during the sound piece of Heith. The atmosphere encouraged forms of attention rarely sustained in institutions of this scale. In the intensity of Authentically Plastic’s bass, the building beat like an organism growing through rhythm. As my body vibrated along with the room, my eyes opened to the possibilities that lie beyond exhausted binaries of institutional critique and institutional branding.
Amedeo Maria Schaller performing among sculptural works of Matt Browning at Kunstverein München. Photo: AWC
Tom Engels inaugurated his Kunstverein München program with remarkable restraint. The exhibition of Matt Browning’s works avoids hectoring conceptual overstatement, focusing instead on physical precision, balancing inside contemporary art’s redundant attention economy. Here, Amedeo Maria Schwaller invited audiences to experience the sound and the ceremony of the Shō, an ancient Japanese reed instrument. The work requires a sort of emptiness, and the instrument must be carefully warmed before a performance begins. Schwaller transformed the process of the shō’s maintenance into temporal composition, exposing the fragilities inside systems that normally present themselves as seamless and permanent. His performance unfolded almost imperceptibly across the building. Sustained chords expanded through staircases and corridors as the instrument gradually detuned itself as it cooled. Visitors adjusted their movements instinctively, lowering voices and lingering longer between rooms. The body trusted the sound completely. It ascended and descended, notes changed almost imperceptibly through Schwaller’s delicate maneuverings. It sounded as if Schwaller deposited his soul briefly in the instrument’s pipes, as it intertwined with the intoning bells of the Theatiner church, the rain and a techno parade approaching from afar. I closed my eyes, enjoying every moment of those blissful 15 minutes.
Justin F. Kennedy performing “Ghosting the Crowd” at Maximiliansforum. Photo: AWC
Justin F. Kennedy’s “Ghosting the Crowd” at Maximiliansforum unfolded as the final psychological stage of a weekend spent moving continuously between openings, dinners, terraces, cigarettes, and institutional small talk. Familiar dance lyrics stretched into uncanny slow motion beneath the underpass while Navild Acosta drifted through the crowd with deliberate detachment. You can dance if you wanna become less an invitation than an exhausted social diagnosis. Kennedy softly interrupted the normal tempo of the passage. People lingered underground long after the performance ended, unwilling to return immediately to the city above with its polished shop windows and expensive calm. The work captured a broader mood running through Various Others this year. Beneath the cultural optimism one sensed fatigue, precarity, and a growing awareness that prosperity cannot guarantee neither emotional nor political stability.
- Cover Image
TUNE x RITOURNELLE, Tikiman & Richard Akingbehin. Photo: Daria Miasoedova. Courtesy of Haus der Kunst.
