Kunsthalle Düsseldorf presents City Limits and Conrad Schnitzler

June 11–August 14, 2022

The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is running two shows at the same time: City Limits and Conrad Schnitzler: Sometimes it gets out of hand and transforms into music.

The exhibition City Limits showcases the work of three artists: Yael Efrati (Israel, 1978), Asta Gröting (Germany, 1961), and Monika Sosnowska (Poland, 1972), all of whom are from the same generation but grew up in quite different geopolitical situations. Gröting grew up in rich postwar Germany, while Sosnowska grew up in totalitarian Poland and Efrati grew up in an Israeli family of Eastern European immigrants.

Despite their cultural disparities, these artists are interested in exploring architectural features and discovering how they represent various political, social, and historical realities using similar artistic tactics.

Their sculptures have a clear historical context, ranging from WWII wreckage to communist-era architecture in Sosnowska’s work to the uprooting of people displaced by the same conflict and its aftermath in Israel in Efrati’s work.

The exhibition took place at the Center for Polish Sculpture in Orosko, Poland, from November 2021 to February 2022, and was co-produced by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. The show will go to the Bat Yam Museum of Art in Israel in 2023 after its visit at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

The exhibition is curated by Sergio Edelsztein (Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv) with co-curator Joanna Kiliszek, and by Gregor Jansen and Alicia Holthausen at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

The project is organised and co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Centre of Polish Sculpture.

The aim of the project Conrad Schnitzler: Sometimes it gets out of hand and turns into music, which includes an exhibition and a festival program, is to reassess the extensive work of Conrad Schnitzler (b. 1937 in Düsseldorf, d. 2011 in Berlin). The show is a cooperation between the imai—Inter Media Art Institute and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

In the exhibition, the audiovisual works of the sculptor, musician, composer, as well as video, performance, and conceptual artist are brought together and made tangible. The festival program invites Schnitzler’s contemporaries and successors to intervene in spaces at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and to contextualize and reflect on his work through discussions, installations, performances, screenings, and concerts.

To this day, Schnitzler is revered around the world as a pioneer of electronic music, even though he did not seek to make music himself and strictly rejected the commercial sale of his works. A lively international network developed around him, which propagated and realized the free circulation, reproduction, and performance of his audio and visual works. Schnitzler’s artistic legacy will now be institutionally recognized for the first time together with the artistic community around him.

Participating artists: Conrad Schnitzler, Noemi Büchi, Cengiz Mengüç, Ken Montgomery, Ulrike Rosenbach, Wolfgang Seidel, Nika Son, Tolouse Low Trax, Keiko Yamamoto, and many others

The exhibition is curated by Stefan Schneider (artist, musician) and Linnea Semmerling (Inter Media Art Institute) with Gregor Jansen and Alicia Holthausen (both Kunsthalle Düsseldorf).

The project is funded by Musikfonds e.V. by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media (BKM), as part of the NEUSTART KULTUR recovery programme and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.