Spring brings with it a flourishing of European Art Weeks. Events which aim to galvanise a city, to share a particular locals’ art scene with the art world-at-large. We could call this showing off, or Venice on a multinational scale, but I find senses of competition and rivalry are rare at art weeks; most act as a point of communion, bringing artists, galleries, workers and enthusiasts together for an excuse to celebrate the art of today—any excuse for an Aperol I say. This focus on conviviality sits at the core of Various Others (VO). Munich’s ‘Art Week’ does it right, it is one of the reasons I keep going back—this will be my third year visiting the city-wide event. Ahead of this year’s VO, which has shifted from September to May, here are five things I look forward to talking to friends about.
VO Special – Too Soon To Say – The Unconference, Hotel Bayerischer Hof May 10th-11th, 2025 (9PM -all night long)
Organised by the venues participating in this year’s VO, The Unconference will be a 24-hour marathon of music, performance, artist talks, conference panels, film screenings, site-specific interventions, and I am sure a whole, whole lot more. Situated in the historic Hotel Bayerischer Hof the event is billed as a ‘glitch in the order of things’, an environment where rules are questioned, where ideas of the possible are reimagined. Pre-fixed ‘To Soon To Say’ the very title of the event exudes a sense of futurity, to quote from the press release: ‘In the face of today’s social and political challenges, the Unconference embraces speculation as a method to open up new perspectives and possibilities for action.’ I just hope there is a dance floor.
Now the east wind hunts, Littlewhitehead at Nir Altman 10th May – 21st June 2025
I recently moved to Glasgow, so I had to include Littlewhitehead’s fourth exhibition with Nir Altman in this preview. Well, that isn’t the only reason: the duo’s artworks are sick (to use a misspelt academic word), echoing the informal energy of Glasgow itself. Uniting what I want to call paintings from the urban landscape—mixed-media assemblages that look like they have been abstracted from alleyway walls—and objects that recall mundane refuse, Littlewhitehead creates bare installations which manifest feelings of abandonment. Visually appearing like ghosts of city life, their artworks present the social world as a series of simulacra with just enough allusion to invite pulp speculation.
Five Friends, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. Museum Brandhorst. 10th April — 17th August 2025
As the title suggests, this exhibition focuses on five friends, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, each now known as a big-time influence on the development of post-war art, be this music, dance or the plastic arts. Bringing together physical artworks and archival remnants, Five Friends aims to unpack the relations that held this band together, conveying how their intimacy propelled them to produce some of the most canonical artworks of the 20th century.
To accompany the exhibition, the Museum Brandhorst has organised a series of dance performances and concerts focusing on the works of Cunningham and Cage.
This Must Be The Place, Nina Celhar, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Kyriaki Goni, Caro Jost, Malvina Panagiotidi, and Helena Tahir at BRITTA RETTBERG 10th May — 21st June 2025
Three galleries in one; This Must Be The Place, a group exhibition with female artists from The Breeder (Athens), Ravnikar (Ljubljana) and Britta Rettberg (Munich) is billed as a ‘nuanced exploration of personal and collective narratives.’ Let’s unpack that vagary: featuring six artists working across media forms, the artworks included examine how histories have come to shape ideas (ideals) around notions of identity; how these ideas are reinterpreted across different spaces and at different times. With three galleries, six artists, aand a swath of differing perspectives, This Must Be The Place seems aimed at challenging hegemonic perspectives, materially conveying how bodies are flexuous pools of hybridity.
Romeo’s eyes, Simon Lässig and Vera Lutz at Kunstverein München 10th May – 17th August 2025
For their first institutional exhibition, the duo Simon Lässig and Vera Lutz will present a newly conceived body of work ranging from film to installation. Central to the pair’s thinking for this presentation is a focus on the politics of seeing, how things are shown and how things come to be understood. Lässig and Lutz began working together, dialogically, in 2015; each with their own respective practices, the pair’s collaborative projects envelop two slightly different perspectives: Lässig’s work questions mimetic processes of seeing, whilst Lutz’s interest lies in the affect of spatiality. Together, Lässig and Lutz undermine romantic notions of representation, making the conditions that effect ways of believing newly sensible.
Special mention: when the eyes lick images, Osamu Shikichi at space n.n. 10th May – 15th June 2025
Osamu Shikichi is a choreographer and dancer. Their practice takes the human body as a starting point, challenging notions of bodily self-possession to explore ideas of anonymity. In an age that demands nobody be anonymous, when the violences of looking are left unquestioned, becoming big business, Shikichi’s work blurs means of identification to provide new ways to perceive of and practice our human agency. On the occasion of VO space n.n. will host a number of performances by Shikichi.
Various Others Munich 2025, May 8th – 18th, 2025 Opening Weekend: May 8th – 11th, 2025
