Whether in real life or in art—the most important thing is that changes start with ourselves, on our own doorsteps, in our immediate surroundings. For this reason the first large exhibition to be put on by Director Dr. Ralf Beil named “Wolfsburg Unlimited” will address the location of Wolfsburg. The title very deliberately connects entrepreneurial and creative energy, the positioning and the dissolution of boundaries.
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What is a city? What distinguishes it? What can it be? Ralf Beil has not only asked himself these questions but also posed them to a circle of selected international artists in order to explore interpretations and metamorphoses of Wolfsburg. Seven large-scale projects created especially for the exhibition reflect the city in the museum, thus making the “city as world laboratory” tangible.
For the first time the entire museum will serve as exhibition spaces, from the entrance and foyers to the educational rooms and the Japan Garden. In Julian Rosefeldt’s total installation in the 16-meters high exhibition hall a container terminal encounters a drive-in movie theater in a scale of 1:1. John Bock has built a material field with film inserts on the architect Hans Scharoun and his Theater Wolfsburg. The photo installations by Eva Leitolf and Peter Bialobrzeski are juxtaposed with a room ensemble by Rémy Markowitsch. A black and white fresco by Didier Rittener as well as a sound window by Nevin Aladag rounds off together with a carousel by Janet Cardiff und George Bures Miller this expansive and multifaceted exploration of city, work, world and museum.
“Wolfsburg Unlimited” is concerned with sounding out this very special city’s stories and histories as well as its (im)possibilities. It will explore the distinctive axes of space and time in this corporation headquarter with adjacent housing facilities that was founded in 1938 as the “City of the KdF [Strength through Joy] Car”—from the garden city of the 1940s, the agglomerations and satellite towns of the 1960s and 1970s to the Porschestraße pedestrian zone of the 1970s and 1980s and the event city with Autostadt, outlet stores and phæno Science Center since 2000.
Wolfsburg represents the realities of modernism as well as the present in a very special way. The “Capital of Volkswagen,” headquarters of a global corporation, is an exemplary site of the latter half of the twentieth century and our own twenty-first century, especially as regards the tension between industrialization, mobilization and digitalization, between mass and individual, between local and global action.
In order to shed light on these thematic fields, the exhibition extends beyond the artist projects to include further, equally central aspects with “Ready-mades” from the areas of film, music, architecture, art and the history of daily life and culture.
A “Hall of Fame” spans the history of Wolfsburg from 10,000 B.C. to the present with the stories of striking objects. Thematic gallery spaces explore the “Model City Wolfsburg,” “Museum King Nordhoff” as well as “VW—The Archeology of a Myth” and examine the exemplary reality of a city, about which the filmmaker Christian Petzold said in 2003: “In no city have I encountered the history of the Federal Republic of Germany in such a concentrated form on the periphery. If things are going badly for VW, then things are going badly for Germany … At the same time it is a place of incredible modernity and productivity.”
“Wolfsburg Unlimited. A City as World Laboratory” attempts to rethink Wolfsburg from an artistic perspective: as a testing ground for our present and future with powerful and sometimes perplexing messages from the past.
The Participating Artists
Franz Ackermann, Nevin Aladag, Christian Andersson, Peter Bialobrzeski, John Bock, Janet Cardiff / George Bures Miller, Christo, Don Eddy, Douglas Gordon, Heinrich Heidersberger, Peter Keetman, Anselm Kiefer, Pia Lanzinger, Eva Leitolf, Rémy Markowitsch, Marcel Odenbach, Arnold Odermatt, Nam June Paik, Antoine Pesne, Peter Roehr, Didier Rittener, Julian Rosefeldt, Werner Schroeter, Luc Tuymans, James Welling, Charles Wilp.
The Publication
The catalogue “Wolfsburg Unlimited. A City as World Laboratory,” edited by Ralf Beil and published by Verlag Hatje Cantz, unites essays by Ralf Beil, Marcel Glaser, Manfred Grieger, Stephan Krass, Alexander Klose, Alexander Kraus, Günter Riederer et al. Interviews by Christiane Heuwinkel and Rémy Markowitsch in addition to documentations of the artist projects and curated sections expand the horizon even further. And artist texts by Peter Bialobrzeski, John Bock and Eva Leitolf as well as source material by Michel Foucault, Josef Ganz, Sigfried Giedion, Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Nordhoff und Peter Sloterdijk make the publication a very different kind of compendium on the city of Wolfsburg. Hardcover, 23 x 28 cm, 352 pages, price in the museum shop: € 35.
Parallel to the exhibition, Peter Bialobrzeski’s “Wolfsburg Diary” with entries by the photographer has been published by The Velvet Cell. Paperback, 14 x 21 cm, 102 pages, price in the museum shop: € 12.
Julian Rosefeldt’s total installation “Midwest,” which interlocks container terminal and drive-in movie theater in the large exhibition hall of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg will be presented in a separate publication with in-situ photographs and a making-of documentation over the course of the exhibition.
our sponsors
The exhibition is supported by Volkswagen Financial Services AG, the city of Wolfsburg, the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, the Sparkasse Gifhorn-Wolfsburg and Pro Helvetia.
Videos
https://youtu.be/wq4mbxDdHW4
https://youtu.be/jaB3qFuhZNA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I3uOa3tn84
https://youtu.be/9b5YYUDDzbE
https://youtu.be/QxPKgkJqeP4
https://youtu.be/7S7lYkE9TWA
https://youtu.be/4_3gc3uVtZo
https://youtu.be/BP969LOG49w
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