Ulrich Bernhardt. NOW: It was, will be and is

With the exhibition »NOW: It Was, Will Be, and Is«, the ZKM pays tribute to the work of Stuttgart-based video and installation artist Ulrich Bernhardt (*1942), one of the most important pioneers of media art in Baden-Württemberg. The exhibition includes early political graphics, mail art, copy art, video installations, and photographs, thus representing the key groups of works in this artist’s oeuvre, who ironically describes himself as the “last analog Swabian romantic.”

For Bernhardt, art is an open, constantly changing process – a form of philosophical activity. When he was serving as artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, which was founded in 1978 mainly on his initiative, he coined the term “künstlerische Forschung” (arts-based research) in the early 1980s to describe certain forms of subjective experience and knowledge transfer. Unlike science, this type of endeavor does not seek empirical evidence, but combines personal experience with unusual, sometimes absurd methods. The outcomes are aesthetic experiences from which new insights can be gained – insights that have the potential to initiate social change.

After a brief stint as a television journalist for the public broadcaster Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR; now SWR) and working on a research project at the University of Stuttgart, in 1974 Bernhardt started to create his first video works in a social context. Since the early 1980s, he has been exploring contemporary technologies and social change in connection with Greek mythology. He is particularly interested in how profound technological developments influence our minds, and how these fundamental processes can be described using conceptions from mythology.

The exhibition centers on two installations by the artist from the ZKM‘s collection: »The River« (1978) and »The Sarcophagus« (1996/2025). Both works engage with different aspects of time, transience, and duration. »The River«, Bernhardt‘s first video installation, explores the fleeting nature of time and the constant changes in the way we communicate. »The Sarcophagus«, on the other hand, addresses the temporal dimension of radioactive radiation, which is beyond the capacity of the human imagination. In this, the artist sees a merging of past, future, and present into an eternal NOW. Against the backdrop of current debates about a return to nuclear power, the work relating to the Chornobyl reactor meltdown in 1986, reminds us of the dangers inherent in nuclear technology that are frequently ignored. Ulrich Bernhardt's exhibition at the ZKM ends on April 26, 2026 – the 40th anniversary of this worst nuclear disaster in history to date.