MÖNCHENGLADBACH.- January 19—February 23
ARI BENJAMIN MEYERS: Hymnus (Fankurve)
KUNSTHALLE FOR MUSIC in Mönchengladbach Act III

Hymnus (Fankurve) is a composition for Mönchengladbach developed and recorded by the Berlin based American composer and artist Ari Benjamin Meyers in collaboration with devoted fans of the Bundesliga club Borussia Mönchengladbach. The project draws inspiration from the chants sung in the soccer stadium and various groups of fans gathered in the so-called Nordkurve (“Northern curve”) of the stands, the designated area for the team’s supporters.

The commanding “power” of this massive chorus—capable of energizing entire stadium crowds—is taken out of its usual soccer match context and shifted to iconic locations around the city. These range from beautiful landmarks and those that contribute to a sense of identity, such as the Kaiser-Friedrich-Halle and the Bökelberg, to forgotten or overlooked places, i.e. the ruins of Haus Westland and the old police headquarters.

The pieces, performed and recorded at various sites around the city as part of production, explore the potential for transcultural exchange: featured songs include such well-known and important fan favorites as Das Borussenlied (“The Borussia Song”), Die Seele brennt (“Fire in the Soul”), and Es gibt nur eine Borussia (“There’s Only One Borussia”); Meyer also composed a new 11-tone hymn, Die MG Elf (“The MG Eleven”), especially for the project. The audio and video recordings of fan chants from these sites have been incorporated into a multimedia installation that will be presented in the museum’s temporary exhibition space. The music will also be available to visitors at the performance venues via QR codes, even after the exhibition closes.

The project is supported by Borussia Mönchengladbach and funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Kunststiftung NRW, the Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Soziales der Sparda-Bank West, the Hans-Fries-Stiftung, and the Museumsverein Abteiberg.

March 15—September 28
PARK McARTHUR

This exhibition of artist Park McArthur (born 1984, North Carolina, US) brings together, for the first time, artworks made between the 2010s and 2020s. Co-organized by mumok in Vienna and Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, the exhibition is a collaboration between both institutions and will be presented simultaneously at both locations. Questions of simultaneous experience and access to art and culture shape this project’s format and purpose.

This exhibition serves as an occasion to consider McArthur’s practice and presence among a recent generation of artists whose materialist and institutionally-responsive strategies refuse to separate critique from imagination. Introduced to a wider public with her solo exhibition of temporary ramps, disabled parking signage, and Wikipedia entry on disabled writer and activist Marta Russell (Ramps, 2014), McArthur’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions. Since then, processes of degeneration and dependency, as experiences filled with aesthetic possibility and formal invention, have been central to McArthur’s practice.

The impossibility of experiencing the exhibition in its entirety is one of this multi-sited project’s propositions. By closely aligning each museum’s presentation and attempting to make the same show in more than one place at once, the exhibition confronts hierarchies of singularity, individuality, independence, and personhood.

A more distant, but by no means less consequential means of experiencing the exhibition is via a new artwork which that takes the form of a text and audio guide. Available onsite at the museums as well as on Museum Abteiberg’s and mumok’s websites for download and streaming, this guide is another means of presenting over a decade of artwork in more than one place simultaneously. The guide’s text will also be published as part of the exhibition’s forthcoming German-English catalog. This catalog, the artist’s first, sustains and extends the exhibition via descriptive documentation and a reference list of artworks and writing spanning 2008–2025.

The realisation of the project at Museum Abteiberg is funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). Funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media) and with the support from the Hans Fries-Foundation, Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Rheinland, Stiftung für Kunst und Wissenschaft der Stadtsparkasse Mönchengladbach and Museumsverein Abteiberg.

Opening festivities will take place March 14, 2025 in Vienna and Mönchengladbach as well as online. A ticket from one museum gains admission to the other.

until October 5
ANDERSCH COLLECTION/ARCHIVE
FIELD TEST #4: KØPCKE – ROTH

ANDERSCH COLLECTION/ARCHIVE, an extensive lot of Fluxus works and ephemera assembled by Dorothee and Erik Andersch, includes works by over 50 artists. Since acquiring the collection in 2017, the museum has gradually cataloged and researched the art objects, books, and archival materials. In 2021, Museum Abteiberg began offering a preview of these holdings through an annual series of changing exhibitions known as the Field Tests. At the same time, the series experiments with different elements for a future display storage (Schaumagazin), which will house ANDERSCH COLLECTION/ARCHIVE long-term. The artists are exhibited in alphabetical order.

Field Test #4: Køpcke – Roth addresses the challenges of museumizing a private collection. A large black and white photo wallpaper offers a glimpse into the past, showing how Dorothee and Erik Andersch lived surrounded by their collection. Across from this is the archival furniture created for Field Test #1: Beuys, a piece that fulfills the museum’s role of not only collecting objects, but also preserving, researching, interpreting, and exhibiting them. Protected behind UV glass, ANDERSCH COLLECTION/ARCHIVE remains shielded from light, preventing even delicate materials such as felt-tip markers on paper from fading or yellowing and ensuring their preservation for future generations.

The finding aid on the tablets in the exhibition room provides a behind-the-scenes look at the museum’s day-to-day work as it runs parallel to the Field Tests presentations: For each alphabetical section, the museum reviews and inventories the holdings. This means that, in addition to the artworks, the extensive archival material is also meticulously recorded in the museum’s inventory database. The museum logs not only the artists’ names, titles, and materials used, but also the exact dimensions, accompanied by photographic documentation and inventory numbers for all objectsn and archival items. The finding aid for the Køpcke – Roth section lists all of this information and also indicates the location of the objects in the space.

Holdings related to Arthur Køpcke and Dieter Roth are joined by selections of materials and works by Shigeko Kubota, George Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, Yoko Ono, Robin Page, Nam June Paik, and Benjamin Patterson, among others.

starting November 20
ANDERSCH COLLECTION/ARCHIVE

Field Test #5: Saito – Ay-O starts on November 20, 2025 with the final installment of ANDERSCH COLLECTION/ARCHIVE’s alphabetically organized Field Tests series of exhibitions, which has been running since 2021. This edition features works and documents by Takako Saito and Ay-O, as well as contributions by Tomas Schmit, Mieko Shiomi, Daniel Spoerri, Ben Vautier, and Wolf Vostell. This final iteration will see the results and insights of the entire series of Field Tests put up for discussion and evaluated. These findings will serve as the basis for the development of the future Schaumagazin, the long-term display storage that will soon be home to the entire range of ANDERSCH COLLECTION/ARCHIVE.

During the runtime of Field Test #5: Saito - Ay-O, efforts will also focus on making ANDERSCH COLLECTION/ARCHIVE as comprehensively accessible online as possible. Building on the existing digital archive website, www.museum-moenchengladbach-1967-1978.de, a new Museum Abteiberg website is set to launch in 2025. Designed as a digital communication and information platform, this new site aims to align with the museum’s identity, inspiring a fresh perspective on art since 1960. It will leverage the collection and archive’s online resources, tailored for both researchers and a broader audience.

The ANDERSCH COLLECTION/ARCHIVE was acquired by Museum Abteiberg in 2017 through an acquisition grant from the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States (Kulturstiftung der Länder), the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), and the Hans Fries-Stiftung. Between 2021 and 2024, the “Research Traineeship for Art Museums in North Rhine-Westphalia” program provided support for the initial cataloging and organization of the collection. The project as a whole is largely funded by the Hans Fries-Stiftung.