Intro

Pluriversum, Museum Folkwang, Essen, 15. 9. 2017 – 7. 1. 2018

Gardens of Cooperation, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 14. 10. 2017 – 14. 1. 2018

Alexander Kluge sees himself as an author. He inspires his readers, listeners and viewers with his films, texts interviews and much more besides. On the occasion of his 85th birthday, Museum Folkwang is presenting an exhaustive exhibition destined to visualize the core of his multimedia oeuvre. A comprehensive programme of accompanying events forms an integral part of the exhibition and is intended to offer a performative experience of the holistic intellectual approach underpinning Kluge’s cosmos. Like the show itself, the accompanying programme has been created with the involvement of Alexander Kluge himself.

In Stuttgart, the exhibition Alexander Kluge: Gardens of Cooperation is based on the comprehensive exhibition of the same name—devoted to the writer, filmmaker, and theorist Alexander Kluge—which was on show at the art center La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona in 2016. In close collaboration with the director of La Virreina, Valentín Roma, and with Alexander Kluge himself, the Württembergischer Kunstverein has developed a reformulation and expansion of seven single aspects of this project. The exhibition’s two main points of reference in terms of content revolve on the one hand around the metaphor of the garden and the idea of the collective—of cooperation—in Kluge’s oeuvre and modes of operation; and on the other hand around forms of emancipation, which are not only the subject of his theoretical and artistic explorations of history, the present, and the future, but with which he himself also tirelessly engages.