COLOGNE.- Museum Ludwig announced its exhibition program in 2025.

Francis Alÿs – Kids Take Over
April 12 – August 3, 2025

Children are the focus of this monumental exhibition that revolves around the thirty video projections of Children’s Games, in which Francis Alÿs (b. 1959 in Antwerp, based in Mexico City) shows playing children from all over the world.

For over twenty years, Alÿs has been traveling to places as diverse as Congo, Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Alaska, and Cuba to film children who are completely immersed in their outdoor playing, frequently using materials they have found. While some of the games have long traditions, others have been spontaneously invented by the children in reaction to their surroundings.

Alÿs chose to turn the largest room of the exhibition—known as the “high hall”—over to the children of Cologne. Fifty schoolchildren between eight and thirteen—like the children in the films—will curate a children’s museum and a playing itinerary in this space.

In the exhibition, the artist will present a new film in his Children’s Games series that was made exclusively with local children, driving home the connection between Alÿs’s project and the children’s museum: Kids Take Over.

Pauline Hafsia M’barek Internationale Photoszene Köln Artist Meets Archive #4
May 17 – November 9, 2025

Every two years, as part of the program Artist Meets Archive that is organized by the International Photoscene Cologne,artists are invited to explore various photographic archives and collections in Cologne. Artist Pauline Hafsia M’barek (b. 1979, based in Brussels and Cologne) has carefully examined the large photography collection at the Museum Ludwig. Her latest project is based on the collection of photo historian Erich Stenger, which the museum acquired in 2005.

Pauline Hafsia M'barek is particularly interested in the chemical-physical nature of the photographic image and its production process. Glass, silver, copper, cotton, gelatine and salt, among others, form the unstable, complex image layers of analog photographs. Over time, their delicate surfaces reveal traces of the recording process and its material conditions in the form of fading, stains or silvering. Pauline Hafsia M'barek's focus is therefore on the vulnerability of photographic archives and the questions of their exhibitability, as they must be shielded from external influences in order to preserve them permanently.

The artist’s immersive installation at the Museum Ludwig interweaves photographs printed on Agfa paper, toxic documents, textbooks on the optics and chemistry of photography, and microscopic analyses of sensitive photographic surfaces to create a speculative multimedia assemblage. Working with temporary experimental procedures, dazzling light phenomena, ephemeral microphenomena, and chemical affinities, M’barek fashions a space pervaded by aspects of conservation and deterioration, of order and entropy, and by the relationship between the eye and the hand. The installation approaches a visuality that is elusive and tenuous.

Five Friends
John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly
October 3, 2025 - January 11, 2026

The exhibition Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly tells the story of an influential yet often overlooked network of five prolific, prominent artists. Although all of them have been recognized as individuals, their strong reciprocal influence, artistic friendships, and romantic relationships have been widely overlooked and rarely studied.

Both individually and as a group, they played central roles in postwar art and made decisive contributions to the history of art, music, and dance with their interdisciplinary work. They continue to inspire generations of artists. With its focus on the interaction between the five artists, the exhibition also reflects on what it meant to be a gay artist in the 1950s, casting new light on the dynamics of postwar art in the United States and beyond.

This is the first time that Cage’s theoretical influence on Rauschenberg and Twombly, the stage sets by Rauschenberg and Johns for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and the formal and content-related dialogues between Twombly, Rauschenberg, and Johns are the subject of a major exhibition. The perfomative and collaborative dimension of their practices exemplifies their shared cultural conceptions of a nonhierarchical, multipolar, and anti-imperialist society.

HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig
De/Collecting Memories
December 6, 2025 – May 10, 2026

In 1890 the US Census Bureau declared the United States fully developed and settled. Leading up to that, Indigenous peoples had been robbed of their lands, railroads had been built in all parts of the country, and the first national parks had been established. That same decade, the first souvenir postcards were produced with color photographs of the US.

Using the latest photochrome process, black-and-white negatives were colorized, reproduced on a mass scale, and marketed on the new traveling routes: between New York and Yellowstone, Florida and Chicago, up to seven million postcards were printed every year, creating a view of America that excluded more than it revealed.

De/Collecting Memories begins where the postcard motifs end and examines what they exclude and block out. The purportedly untouched nature depicted in the colorful images constituted the living space and cultural environment of the Indigenous population long before white people made it accessible to tourists and settled it and stipulated what narratives were to be told.

The exhibition brings together holdings from the museum's photography collection with the work Sky Dances Light from 2024, an installation of clouds made of tin bells by contemporary Indigenous artist Marie Watt (born 1967 in Seattle, Washington). The tin bells are an homage to the jingle dress dance, which originated as a healing ritual among the Ojibwe tribe around 1900 during the flu pandemic. The Jingle Dress Dance was also a radical act, as the United States banned ceremonial gatherings of indigenous peoples in 1883.

Presentations in the Photography Room

Street Photography
Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Joseph Rodríguez
May 3 – October 12, 2025

With its frank view of everyday life in urban spaces, street photography made a radical break with traditional photographic approaches. Instead of staged poses, it aimed to capture the fleeting moments in which light, composition, and event meld into a meaningful story. This presentation features photographs by Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Joseph Rodríguez, three famous protagonists of street photography in the United States who have significantly developed the genre. Iconic photographs from the 1960s to 1980s are presented alongside lesser-known examples from their respective oeuvres. The photographs come from donations from the Bartenbach family in 2015, a donation from Volker Heinen in 2018 and from acquisitions since 2001.

Smile!
How the smile came into photography
November 1, 2025 – March 22, 2026

The people depicted in old portrait photographs often look into the camera with expressions that are quite serious. Today, in an era when smiles are an integral part of photography, their countenances seem strangely stiff. How did this change come about? Is it really only due to improvements in dental hygiene, or does the promise of happiness in advertising play a part? This retrospective in the Photography Room investigates these questions to better understand why our “photography faces” have changed over time.