Sat, March 25, 2023
– Sun, February 25, 2024
ZKM is closely networked internationally and realizes traveling exhibitions worldwide in cooperation with local partners. Currently, exhibitions are scheduled in France and India.
We are facing major challenges: Climate change, energy transition, artificial intelligence, pandemics, economic turmoil, and social polarization necessitate a rethink at all levels. The bad news and the good news: We are, on a global scale, all affected and connected. Our common future is at stake. That is why we can only find solutions together.
With our new program, we want to bring people together: in networks, across geographies and cultures. We go back to the founding idea of the ZKM and invite you all to join us in shaping the world together. With inspiration from art, science, and technology in the context of social perspectives and change.
We are all »Fellow Travellers«, looking together into an unknown future, a future with technologies and waves of innovation that we cannot even imagine today.
»Fellow Travellers« marks a new way of working at ZKM. This exhibition without a defined end fulfills the ZKM principle of experimentation and open thinking with society, entirely in the spirit of making change practice and citizen participation. In the heart of ZKM, the project will be manifest as a series of laboratories, presentations, experiments, landscapes, where artists, scientists, communities, cultures, collectives, robots, machines, flora, fauna, and other intelligences will learn together to make the world anew.
This marks the beginning of the transformation of ZKM into a »Useum«: a place used by people to make and do things together, not just to look and observe. It takes us beyond singular perspectives of the world, and this creates a portal between Karlsruhe and the many places and cosmologies of the universe. (Alistair Hudson)
Sung Hwan Kim grew up in South Korea. Today he spends his time between New York and Hawaii; »They see us there in our time« is a touring exhibition in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven with performance contributions by musician and composer David Michael DiGregorio (aka dogr).
Folklore, myths and gossip are portals through which we enter Sung Hwan Kim's installations, where feelings are reliable sources for understanding the world. His distinctive method of intertwining video, music, stories, and sculpture creates a storytelling approach to understanding migration, immigration, translation, and regeneration from new perspectives and a spirit of empathy. (Alistair Hudson)
In 2024, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera will begin a series of projects that engage directly with the city of Karlsruhe, culminating in an exhibition at ZKM in 2025.
More than ten years ago, Bruguera's »Arte Útil« (»art as a tool«) introduced art that moves out of the realm of static objects, pictorial representation, and commentary, and towards the idea of an active process that takes effect in the world and strives for social and political change. In this, »Arte Útil« is not merely an individual project, but a collectivization of energies and people to find alternative ways to rebalance the world so that it benefits the many and not just the few.
As Senior Lecturer in Media and Performance, Theater, Dance and Media at Harvard University, Bruguera's goal is to use technological tools to benefit society. She is an ideal artist to help shape ZKM’s next chapter. (Alistair Hudson)
Zheng Guogu is an artist from China's post-Cultural Revolution generation. His youth coincided with the time when Maoism was already a thing of the past and the country was opening up to the rest of the world. In his hybrid world, Guogu combines architecture, gardens, tea drinking, painting, artificial intelligence, and spirituality, and situates them amidst the world's multiple cosmologies, entangled with society, technology, and nature. In doing so, his concern is to weave the world's energies into a flow that is sympathetic to our need to remake the world, its ecologies, economics, and ethics.
At ZKM in 2024, Zheng Guogu will create a new garden and cosmological landscape, in a spirit of interlocal, reciprocal learning – one specific place in the world connecting with another. (Alistair Hudson)
robotlab is a collective based in Karlsruhe, Germany, that works with industrial robots in public spaces. The artist group was founded in 2000 by Matthias Gommel, Martina Richter (aka Martina Haitz), and Jan Zappe. They primarily work with Kuka, one of the world's leading industrial robotics companies, which developed the first intelligent robot in 1973 and whose workshops were once located in the old Hallenbau, now home to ZKM.
In their new installation »AEIOU«, commissioned by ZKM, robotlab questions our current realities created by the synergy of robots and artificial intelligence. By using AI to thematize their technical identity and material conditions, the machines in the exhibition space allow the public to participate in their process of reflection, which balances the boundaries between man and machine.
Collective learning related to new technologies and their application for the benefit of people and the planet is a central theme of ZKM. To advance the understanding and development of AI in ways that benefit us, we will establish a series of labs in the future.
In this context, a large commissioned work on AI will be created together with the Korean-German artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan, who is also a professor for digital media at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. Anne Duk Hee is representative of a new generation of media artists who use humor and playful experimentation to address serious and pressing issues and bring new perspectives. Rather than focusing on efficiency, their concept of »Artificial Stupidity« explicitly allows for error and non-intelligence in the field of robotics. (Alistair Hudson)
