Eine Stadt als Atelier
22 May to 19 July 2026
Opening: Thursday, 21 May 2026

Featuring contributions by Michael Van den Abeele, Chantal Akerman, Danai Anesiadou, Ethan Assouline, Sammy Baloji, Marianne Berenhaut, Kasper Bosmans, Jef Cornelis, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Laurent Dupont, Jana Euler, Arnaud Eubelen, Collectif Faire-part, Béla Feldberg, Mona Filleul, Gust Duchateau, Felix Kindermann, Aglaia Konrad, Stéphane Mandelbaum, Céline Mathieu, Hana Miletić, Shaun Motsi, Willem Oorebeek, Jurgen Ots, Marina Pinsky, Sophie Podolski, Emile Rubino, Chéri Samba, Michaela Schweighofer, Beat Streuli, Walter Swennen, and Angharad Williams.

Brussels is not a city of seamless processes. It is precisely through its imperfections, improvisations and prosthetic fixes that the city unfolds its singular, almost deranged energy. Alongside its dysfunctionality, the pervasive appropriation and reinterpretation of histories, spaces and objects shape the urban fabric. In Brussels, the permeability between urban life and artistic practice is unusually direct. What is encountered on the street finds its way into the work. Even the name Brussels, derived from Old Dutch and meaning “home in the swamp”, points to a soft, fermenting substratum from which new forms continually emerge.

Anyone living in Brussels is confronted with bricolage: car bodies wrapped in adhesive tape, buildings secured by makeshift means, peculiar shop windows. The makeshift leaves scars upon the urban body, which in turn generate their own form of permanence. Ad hoc structures establish themselves wherever responsibilities begin to fray: Brussels consists of nineteen municipalities, just as many mayors, a web of regional and national competences, historical lines of conflict, and monarchical representation. Set against the city’s fragile structural cohesion are the heavyweight presences of the EU and NATO. Since the 1950s, the European Quarter has undergone the kind of urban redevelopment for which the term “Brusselisation” was coined. The word now appears wherever history disappears under the pressure of new forms of expediency.

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Curated by Fabian Flückiger and Valérie Knoll

We are delighted that Eine Stadt als Atelier has been nominated for the *WESTSTERN Prize 2026 in the category Exhibition.

Image: Kasper Bosmans, Legend: Loot, Soil and Cleanliness, 2016, Courtesy The Artist

Game of No Games – Symposium
Saturday, 11.2.2023, 10 am – 4 pm

The symposium aims to explore the question of whether there is a need today for categorisations through terms such as Outsider Art. Is a definition possible at all, or is the term not rather arbitrary and oriented more towards social ideas of norms than towards the artistic work?

The symposium is part of the programme accompanying the exhibition Game of No Games at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, which presents historical and contemporary works by artists who have received little attention throughout art history. Their participation in society and the art world has been limited—as a result of conservatorships, disenfranchisement, or discrimination, to name a few.

10:30–11:00 am      
Welcome Nikola Dietrich and Susanne Zander 
                                   
Amelie Gappa 
A Feminist Perspective on the Work of Helga Goetze

11:00–11:30 am       
Lisa Arndt
Adelhyd van Bender – The Atom is Invincible

11:30–12:15 pm       
Andreas Fischer
“Take paints in hand and draw…”: The medium Margarethe Held
(cancelled due to illness)

12:30–01:15 pm       
Falk Wolf
The Shadow of the Avant-garde

01:15–02:00 pm       
Charlotte Laubard (in English)
Finding new grounds

03:15–04:30 pm Panel 
Moderator: Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck
Speakers: Nikola Dietrich, Kito Nedo, Susanne Pfeffer and Susanne Zander

The symposium is organized in cooperation with ZADIK | Central Archive for German and International Art Market Research, University of Cologne.

Ewa Majewska
Coronafuga. Fragments of online dating discourse from pandemic times
Welcom by Eva Birkenstock and Nikola Dietrich
Book presentation and reading with Ewa Majewska and the performance artist Wojciech Kosma
at the Ludwig Forum, Aachen

The event will be held in English.

At the conclusion of reboot: responsiveness, a presentation and reading of the latest publication by Polish cultural theorist and activist Ewa Majewska will take place at the Ludwig Forum Aachen in the presence of the author and performance artist Wojciech Kosma.

Coronafuga. Fragments of online dating discourse from pandemic times is an auto-theoretical negotiation of online dating discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic. The book combines theory and digital dating conversations into a literary account of discourses of intimacy during pandemic times. Media and other tools like dating sites, conversations in, around, and about digital flirting, and immediate entertainment are key elements of this book.

Ewa Majewska (lives in Warsaw) is a feminist cultural theorist, activist, and author. She has taught at the University of the Arts in Berlin, the University of Warsaw, and Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, the ICI Berlin, and the IWM in Vienna. She currently works at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. She has released six books, most recently Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common (2021), and publishes in journals and platforms such as e-flux, Signs, Third Text, Journal of Utopian Studies, and Jacobin, among others. Her current research focuses on archival studies, dialectics of the weak, feminist critical theory, and antifascism.

The publication is part of reboot:—a collaborative, cyclical, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue between performative and research-based practices, co-hosted by the Kölnischer Kunstverein and Ludwig Forum Aachen. The first cycle reboot: responsiveness provided infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around themes of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann.

Ewa MajewskaCoronafuga. Fragments of online dating discourse from pandemic timesEdited by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, Viktor Neumann
English
Cu-published by Ludwig Forum Aachen and Kölnischer Kunstverein with DISTANZ Verlag
ISBN 97-3-95476-523-2

The book can be purchased at the Ludwig Forum Aachen as well as online at DISTANZ Verlag.

€ 16,-

Film-Screening with an introduction by Naeem Mohaiemen
Thursday, 15.06.2023, 4–6 pm

Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017): “The Third World was not a place, but a project.” (Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, 2007). This was to be a utopian alliance where the Global South would reconfigure planetary leadership, ending Euro-American dominance. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) attempted to navigate a “third way,” but parallel participation in the Petrodollar-driven “Islamic bloc” by some member countries shredded fragile coalitions behind the scenes. Two Meetings and a Funeral explores a “pivot” moment between the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Algeria and the 1974 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting in Pakistan. The unraveling of old alliances began from a barely discernible venn diagram overlap between these two groups, one that would taken on world significance after the OPEC oil crisis, the Iranian revolution, and the invasion of Afghanistan.

Traveling through the residues of transnational architecture (Niemeyer, Moretti, Le Corbusier) in New York, Algiers, and Dhaka, the film considers the erosion of the idea of the Third World as a potential space for decolonisation, and an always imperfect understanding of Socialism. Conversations between Vijay Prashad, Samia Zennadi, Atef Berredjem, Amirul Islam, and Zonayed Saki look at the contradictions of decolonization movements that never remembered to liberate their own leadership. The film is a midpoint for Mohaiemen’s loosely affiliated projects around the Non-Aligned Movement.

The film screening is part of the exhibition Langer Tag by Naeem Mohaiemen, curated by Nina Möntmann, June 14-18, 2023, Temporary Gallery.

Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: curatorial project of the DFG-Research Training Group „connecting – excluding. Cultural Dynamics Beyond Globalized Networks“

Admission is free, registration is not required.

Jenny Holzer’s Truisms is made up of a collection of almost 300 aphorisms and statements written by the artist. In the 1970s she began presenting these on self-printed posters, and later on she used advertising billboards. From the 1980s on, these catchy phrases were reproduced as a variety of ephemera such as t-shirts and caps with the slogan Men don´t protect you anymore, which were part of her Survival Series (1983). They even made their way, somewhat controversially, onto condom wrappers. In this way, she has continued to infiltrate public space, questioning omnipresent cliches about gender roles and commenting on socially relevant topics of the day, such as equality, poverty, the environment, and the abuse of power.

The T-Shirt was published on the occasion of the exhibition Maskulinitäten. Eine Kooperation von Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischem Kunstverein und Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (September 1 – November 24, 2019).

Jenny Holzer: ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE
2019
Screenprint on 100 % organic cotton T-Shirt
Available in Size S / M / L
© 2019 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
€ 27,00 (plus € 3,00 shipping fee)

Please note your desired size (S / M / L) with your order in the Comments field!

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Jenny Holzer: MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE
2019
Screenprint on 100 % organic cotton T-Shirt
Available in Size S / M / L
© 2019 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
€ 27,00 (plus € 3,00 shipping fee)

Please note your desired size (S / M / L) with your order in the Comments field!

Order

Genoveva Filipovic: Bridge of Sigh, 2022
Pop-up book made of eloxated aluminium sheets, paper and staples, in two drawers
27 cm x 7 cm x 3.3 cm
Edition: 20 + 5 AP
Certificate
€ 250,00

The aluminum blanks designed and manufactured by Interzone in Berlin were milled flat from a single piece. The three main elements were subsequently drilled so that connecting hinges could be installed. The spine’s central hinges are glued and a total of 12 precision components were assembled by hand. The surfaces have been honed and anodized.

Genoveva Filipovic (b. 1986, Frankfurt am Main) lives in New York. Her works have recently been shown at Galleria Federico Vavassori in Milan (2019), Kunsthalle Zürich (2019), Goton in Paris (2018), Greene Naftali (2018), Svetlana (2018) and Dead Ends (2016) in New York, Vilma Gold in London (2016), and Neue Alte Brücke in Frankfurt am Main (2014).

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