Archive Space

February 29, 2020 - December 31, 2025

Following a period of intensive research, the artist Julian Göthe drew on Kunstverein München’s architectural conditions to develop the Archive Space which served as an integral part of the institution from 2020 to 2025.

In the context of the bicentennial anniversary in 2023, it offered a specific room for preserving, examining and negotiating the institution’s history, while also creating a space for public formats conceived in collaboration with archivists, (art) historians, and artists. These formats will enabled the Kunstverein to reflect on its own institutional history as well as the gaps in it.

Combining preservation and events in the one place allowed for a reflexive examination of the task and urgency of the institution’s form in relation to its historical context. On one hand, this concerned methodological questions about the future organization of knowledge and archiving, beyond the practice of storing historical materials at the City Archive Munich. On the other, it pursued the question of how to combine the processing and presentation of the archive alongside artistic works that would offer a lively and complex reading of history. Through combining these aspects does a multilayered and subjective approach to the archive was made possible.

On the first floor, Julian Göthe (b. 1966 in Berlin) conceived an installation that drew on the building’s architecture and the history of the Kunstverein’s program. In his artistic practice spanning the media of collage, sculpture, drawing, and installation, Göthe explores both epochal and marginal episodes in cultural history. References to the formal principles of Art Deco, set design, and the everyday application of modernist forms all overlap in his work and are also manifest in the Archive Space’s design. This resulted in a large-scale artwork that examined hanging conventions of the last two centuries, spatial hierarchies as well as the reaction to the classicist austerity of the 19th century architecture. Göthe’s housing of the archive gave the documents and their attendant discourse a fixed place within the Kunstverein’s architecture and program, and formed both the foreground and background, venue and stage to critically engage with its past and potential futures.

From September 2020 to December 2025, selected material from the history of the Kunstverein were on display in the Archive Space, entering into resonance with the respective exhibition and allowing for references and ruptures.

Archive Space brochure DE / EN