Starting a few days ago, the former lignite power plant in Chemnitz is hosting the Begehungen Art Festival. The exhibition will be open until 17 August at the site, which will be decommissioned in 2024, and will feature 32 works by international artists. The site also features a chimney designed by French artist Daniel Buren (7 Colours for a Chimney). Entitled Everything is Interaction, the art festival focuses on themes such as resource consumption, species loss and the climate crisis. Works by artists such as Lara Almarcegui, Olaf Nicolai, Henrike Naumann, Uriel Orlow, Ursula Biemann, Gregor Schneider, Paulo Tavares, Daniel Otero Torres, Günther and Loredana Selichar and Hito Steyerl are on display. These works address the social, ecological and economic consequences of environmental destruction, issues of justice and power, and related social debates. A good quarter of the works, such as Rikuo Ueda's wind installation, were created specifically for the location during artist residencies.
The exhibition is complemented by a festival programme that includes concerts, readings, lectures and performances. The Begehungen art festival has been held in Chemnitz since 2003, each year at a different venue. This year it is part of the programme for Chemnitz 2025, European Capital of Culture.
↗ Art Festival Begehungen 2025
Chemnitz Art Collections in the Capital of Culture year
The major exhibitions of the Chemnitz Art Collections play an important role in the diverse art programme of Chemnitz 2025. On 10 August, the exhibition Edvard Munch. Angst will open at the Art Collections on Theaterplatz. Until then, the successful exhibition European Realities, which is dedicated to the diverse realism movements of the 1920s and 1930s on a scale never seen before, can still be seen at the Gunzenhauser Museum. The Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Ensemble, consisting of the country house and residential mill of the family of the Chemnitz-born artist, was renovated as an urban development project for Chemnitz 2025 and opened as a museum in April.
On 24 August, the Chemnitz Art Collections will celebrate a ‘Festival of Expressionism’ there. In addition, during the Capital of Culture year, the Art Collections will present an exhibition on the Clara Mosch artist group (1977–1982) and the Galerie Oben, which opposed the official cultural establishment of the GDR and developed Karl-Marx-Stadt into a hotspot for the alternative art scene.
↗ Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz / Chemnitz Art Collections
Urban art for Chemnitz 2025
From 28 August to 21 September, the Hallenkunst project will be showing a wide range of international artistic positions in Chemnitz's historic market hall that draw inspiration from street culture and graffiti – a movement that was ‘born as a crisis phenomenon’ and spread as a subculture, but never really established itself as an art genre.
Under the title Art in Transit and Beyond, the Hallenkunst project aims to highlight the complex influence of graffiti and the subway art movement on today's art world. For over 40 years, this subculture and its protagonists have been influencing and blending various forms of creative expression such as pop art, painting, photography, illustration, design, music and art in public spaces. More than 70 artists from Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark and the USA are participating in the group exhibition, including Jasmin HERA Siddiqui, Samy Deluxe, Hendrik Beikirch, Jan Kalab, CMP ONE, Dondi, Futura2000, Lars Teichmann, Claudia MadC Walde and many more.
In advance of the event, the Public Mural Programme of Hallenkunst has already created eight facades and surfaces in public spaces in Chemnitz with freestanding works by international artists, which are visible from afar.
The ibug 2025 urban art festival (short for Industrie-Brachen-Um-Gestaltung, or industrial wasteland redevelopment) will take place over three weekends from 22 August to 7 September at a former hospital in Chemnitz. In its 20th edition, ibug is once again turning a relic of Saxon industrial culture into a temporary canvas for artists from all over the world. Originally built as Presto-Werke and later used as headquarters by Auto-Union AG, the site was converted into a hospital after the Second World War. The so-called ‘Krankenhaus Stadtpark’ was closed in 1997 and has been vacant ever since. A total of 70 artists, duos and collectives from 25 countries have been invited to Chemnitz to transform three buildings and the inner courtyard of the former hospital into a festival site with their works. The spectrum of art ranges from large-scale murals, paste-ups and illustrations to installations and multimedia projects.
↗ ibug - International festival for urban art in Saxony
Art in the Capital of Culture Region
At the same time, one of the most extensive and lasting projects for Chemnitz 2025 is growing in the Capital of Culture region: the PURPLE PATH art and sculpture trail. Featuring works by renowned regional, national and international artists, this unique exhibition in rural public spaces creates a symbolic connection between the 38 municipalities of the Capital of Culture region and Chemnitz over a distance of around 400 kilometres. Curator Alexander Ochs has brought works by Alice Aycock, Tony Cragg, Leiko Ikemura, Olaf Holzapfel, Nevin Aladağ, Via Lewandowsky and Leunora Salihu, among others, to the region.
At the end of the Capital of Culture year, a light art installation by James Turrell will be unveiled on the site of a former coal mining facility and the current KohleWelt Museum in Oelsnitz.
Until the end of November, Rebecca Horn's work The Universe in a Pearl can be seen as a temporary installation on the PURPLE PATH art and sculpture trail in the Hospitalkirche in Lößnitz.
↗ PURPLE PATH art and sculpture trail
Due to popular demand, the exhibition Sun Seekers! on art and mining at Wismut in Zwickau, organised in cooperation with Chemnitz 2025, has been extended until 26 October.
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