RAVENSBURG.- Kunstmuseum Ravensburg will open three interconnected exhibitions this August, led by Janet Cardiff’s internationally acclaimed sound installation The Forty Part Motet. Presented alongside a dialogue between German Expressionism and contemporary art, as well as a participatory exhibition created with children, the program examines how art can reshape historical narratives and offer new perspectives on enduring social questions.

Running from August 8 through November 15, 2026, Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet will occupy the museum’s second floor. The installation, considered one of the Canadian artist’s most important works, has been presented internationally but will be experienced in Baden-Württemberg for the first time.

Created in 2001, the work is based on Spem in Alium, the monumental 40-part composition written around 1570 by English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis. Cardiff commissioned a performance by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir in southern England and recorded each of the 40 singers on a separate audio track.

In the installation, those individual voices are transmitted through 40 speakers arranged in an oval. The spatial configuration allows visitors to hear the composition not as a fixed concert performance, but as an environment they can physically explore. Moving among the speakers, listeners can experience the full polyphonic work or approach a single voice, shifting between soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass.

The result is a continually changing, three-dimensional listening experience shaped by each visitor’s position and movement. By placing the audience inside the choir, Cardiff dissolves the conventional boundary between performer and spectator and transforms Tallis’s sacred composition into a sculptural encounter with sound.

“I am interested in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space,” Cardiff has said of the installation.

Born in Brussels, Ontario, in 1957, Cardiff studied at Queen’s University and the University of Alberta. After initially working in photography and printmaking, she became internationally known for immersive sound installations, audio walks and video-based projects that combine narrative, movement and audience participation. Many of her works have been created with her partner, artist George Bures Miller. The pair received the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize in 2020.

Since its creation, The Forty Part Motet has appeared at institutions including the Hara Museum ARC in Gunma, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, Museum Tinguely in Basel, the National Gallery of Canada, Tate Modern and The Met Cloisters.

On the museum’s first floor, Zeitfragen: Sammlung trifft Gegenwart — translated as Questions of Our Time: The Collection Meets the Present — places works from the museum’s Selinka Collection in conversation with contemporary art.

The Selinka Collection focuses on 20th-century art, particularly German Expressionism, a movement that emerged during a period of political upheaval and profound social and artistic change. Rather than presenting the historical works in isolation, the exhibition examines continuities and ruptures between generations, encouraging visitors to reconsider established narratives through six thematic groupings.

The exhibition addresses questions surrounding the body and gender roles, representations of ethnic minorities, humanity’s relationship with nature, consumer culture and the lasting consequences of war. Featured artists include Kader Attia, Fiona Banner, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Otto Mueller, Edvard Munch, Daniel Richter, Ulrike Rosenbach, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Agnès Varda.

One section contrasts the Expressionists’ drawings of friends and lovers with Fiona Banner’s Mirror from 2007, a text-based portrait describing the naked body of actress Samantha Morton. The comparison raises questions about intimacy, public exposure and the power of the gaze.

Edvard Munch’s lithograph Madonna – Loving Woman, created between 1895 and 1902, is paired conceptually with Ulrike Rosenbach’s feminist video work Don’t Believe I’m an Amazon. In the 1975 work, Rosenbach superimposed her face on a traditional image of the Virgin Mary before shooting arrows at it, confronting inherited ideals of feminine passivity.

Elsewhere, works by Otto Mueller depicting Sinti and Roma people are reconsidered alongside the textile collages of Polish-Romani artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. While Mueller’s images often projected romanticized ideas of freedom and closeness to nature, Mirga-Tas creates self-determined representations of Romani history, community and everyday life from within the culture itself.

Environmental concerns emerge through pairings involving Mueller, Daniel Richter, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and filmmaker Agnès Varda. Varda’s 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I connects the historic practice of gathering leftover crops with contemporary forms of reuse and resistance to consumer waste.

The legacy of war is explored through Erich Heckel’s 1919 self-portrait Portrait of a Man and Kader Attia’s monumental wooden busts from the series Culture, Another Nature Repaired. Inspired by photographs of First World War soldiers with severe facial injuries, Attia’s sculptures examine different cultural approaches to wounds, memory and repair.

Completing the program on the ground floor is Zeitfragen für Kids: Sammlung Selinka aus Kinderaugen — Questions of Our Time for Kids: The Selinka Collection Through Children’s Eyes. Developed through workshops with young participants, the project brings children’s observations, stories and visual responses together with original Expressionist works from the collection.

The exhibition invites both children and adults to encounter familiar artworks through the ideas of a younger generation. Admission to the museum’s ground floor will be free throughout the exhibition.