Archive Space
since February 29, 2020
Following a period of intensive research, the artist Julian Göthe drew on Kunstverein München’s architectural conditions in order to develop the Archive Space that will become a permanent part of the institution.
In the lead-up to the bicentennial anniversary in 2023, it offers a specific room for preserving, examining and negotiating the institution’s history, while also creating a space for public formats which will be conceived in collaboration with archivists, (art) historians, and artists. These formats will enable the Kunstverein to reflect on its own institutional history as well as the gaps in it.
Combining preservation and events in the same place enables a reflexive examination of the task and urgency of the institution’s form in relation to the historical context. On one hand, this concerns 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 will also pursue the question of how to combine the processing and presentation of the archive with artistic works that offer a lively and complex reading of history. Only by combining these aspects does a multilayered and subjective approach to the archive become possible.
On the first floor, Julian Göthe (b. 1966 in Berlin) has conceived an installation that draws 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 has resulted in a large-scale artwork that examines 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 new housing of the archive gives the documents and their attendant discourse a fixed place within the Kunstverein’s architecture and program, and forms both the foreground and background, venue and stage to critically engage with its past and potential futures.
Starting in September 2020, selected material from the history of the Kunstverein will be on display in the Archive Space, entering into resonance with the respective exhibition and allowing for references and ruptures.
The Archive Space has been realized with kind support of Holzrausch.
Installation views: Archive Space at Kunstverein München, 2020; courtesy Kunstverein München e.V.