MUNICH.- There are moments in which order appears less as a system than as a fragile agreement between things. A cat asleep on a window sill. A chair shifted slightly toward the open window. Three empty cardboard boxes that nobody remembers bringing into the room. A blanket preserving the outline of someone no longer there. For now, this is the order of things, while light continues to move through the room long after it has changed purpose.
For more than four decades, Annika Eriksson has developed work attentive to the unstable arrangements through which figures inhabit space alongside one another. Her films, performances, and installations observe how gestures, habits, and routines organize forms of living together: how proximity is negotiated, how behavior adjusts itself under observation, and how invisible structures shape everyday life.
Because the world is full of eyes.
In Eriksson’s work, observation rarely functions as mastery. Instead, it circulates as exposure, vulnerability, and attachment. The distance required for observation is never secure. One begins by watching another creature only to discover that the creature has become a companion. Or a rival. Or a mirror. Animals stare back with a patience that unsettles the scene, while humans begin regulating themselves the moment they realize they are being watched. Someone observes from across the room while another refuses to return the gaze. Near a doorway, a dog waits without explanation: teeth, drool, language.
Yet beneath this fragile coexistence lies another tension. What first appears as attentiveness slowly darkens into fixation. A gaze lingers too long. Habits become compulsions. Attention turns into surveillance. Systems begin producing exceptions. Rules generate loopholes. The situation starts developing a life of its own. Meanwhile the cat keeps sleeping through the entire thing.
Because every order also contains a command.
In and order, Eriksson approaches these situations through a constellation of forms that continuously rearrange the relationship between image, object, and space. Moving-image works—described by Eriksson as “anti-videos”—coexist with small- and large-scale collages, dioramas, and a sculptural environment that extends across the exhibition. If collage traditionally assembles fragments into a new image, here it also becomes a way of organizing the page, the wall, and the room itself. Images return in altered forms and unexpected scales. They cluster together, spill outward, and occasionally threaten to overwhelm the structures intended to contain them. What begins as an act of organization gradually approaches obsession; what appears orderly threatens, at any moment, to become absurd.
Throughout her career, Eriksson has approached such structures not through abstraction but through lived situations: through acts of observation, imitation, compliance, resistance, and refusal. For her first solo exhibition at Kunstverein München in 2003, Eriksson presented Arbeitswelt, turning her attention toward the behavioral structures surrounding labor and security through conversations with fifty-five employees at the Munich offices of the insurance company Swiss Re. Across a three-channel video installation lasting two hours, office routines, interviews, and everyday forms of conduct gradually accumulated into an unusual portrait of a workplace and the social relations that sustained it.
Twenty-three years later, similar questions emerge elsewhere. No longer located primarily in institutional structures, they surface in domestic interiors, among animals, and in the small habits through which everyday life is arranged.
Lukas Gschwandtner: Möbelstücke etc.
June 27, 2026–ongoing
Chairs, benches, pedestals, vitrines, and tables are the silent partners of institutional life. They support bodies and objects, organize attention, and structure encounters, all while appearing to do very little at all. Möbelstücke etc., the first institutional exhibition by Lukas Gschwandtner, brings them to the foreground.
Intended for use as much as contemplation, Gschwandtner’s works can be sat on, leaned against, gathered around, or simply looked at. Neither fully sculpture nor just furniture, they invite both display and interaction, allowing the structures that ordinarily frame experience to become experience itself.
Conceived for the foyer of Kunstverein München, the project continues a history of artistic and architectural interventions beyond the institution’s exhibition halls that dates back to the 1990s. The starting point for Möbelstücke etc. is not merely an empty room, but a space already shaped by decades of additions, alterations, and applications. The Kunstverein, the Hofgarten, and the arcades are all marked by successive transformations, where reconstruction sits alongside preservation, and new additions exist beside older forms.
Gschwandtner approaches these transformations as something to neither preserve nor overcome, but rather as material. Through a deliberately restricted vocabulary of canvas, metal, and glass, existing shapes are translated rather than reproduced. Volumes are pressed into surfaces, details flattened into relief, and spatial structures condensed into sculptural fragments.
The exhibition is conceived not as a fixed installation but as an arrangement whose elements may be repositioned and recombined over time. As uses change, so too can the relationships between the works. Rather than stabilizing the foyer into a final form, Möbelstücke etc. treats it as an evolving environment shaped through continuous occupation and operation. The duration of the exhibition remains equally open-ended.
Donika Kelly: A mist, a wind, the old dog and the hill
presented in the Schaufenster by Jason Dodge / Fivehundred Places, translated by Tanja Widmann
June 27–September 13, 2026
The Schaufenster presents A mist, a wind, the old dog and the hill by the American poet Donika Kelly, alongside a German translation by the artist Tanja Widmann. Kelly’s contribution is the second installment in the Schaufenster series, developed in collaboration with Jason Dodge and his poetry imprint fivehundredplaces. It presents poems from forthcoming 500Places publications as temporary public installations before they appear in print. The poem appears as a luminous text in a window of Kunstverein München and can be read day and night from the Hofgarten and the surrounding arcades.
Curated by Tom Engels.
