MÖNCHENGLADBACH.- Museum Abteiberg is presenting Unconditional, a new exhibition by Tobias Kaspar that examines how artworks change as they move through different places, hands and institutional settings. On view from September 18 through November 29, 2026, the project was developed in cooperation with the Stiftisches Humanistisches Gymnasium Mönchengladbach (HUMA) and grew out of Kaspar’s 2025/26 Mönchengladbach International Studio Scholarship.

At the center of the exhibition is a work also titled Unconditional. Kaspar created it as a transportable piece housed in a specially designed crate with display elements. It consists of four photographs coated with gray scratch-off material, making their surfaces especially vulnerable to touch, handling and change.

Rather than trying to protect the work from those changes, Kaspar has made them part of the project. The piece is intended to travel to schools, nursing homes and other care institutions, where transportation, installation and everyday interaction will gradually leave visible traces. Each new setting becomes part of the work’s history.

The first institution to borrow the piece is HUMA, located next to Museum Abteiberg. There, teachers and students will discuss how the work should be handled and what it means to care for an object that is designed to change. Their conversations and observations will be recorded in a logbook supplied by the artist.

The project began with an anecdote about an event from the early 2010s whose truth can no longer be verified. Instead of trying to establish exactly what happened, Kaspar uses the uncertainty as a way to think about memory itself — how stories change when they are repeated, viewed, touched and passed from one person to another.

That process of transformation is built directly into the work. Although the title Unconditional sounds absolute, the images, surfaces and stories surrounding the piece remain deliberately open to alteration. What happens in the borrowing institutions stays within those spaces; at HUMA, for example, the classroom presentation is not open to the public.

Museum Abteiberg is showing a second version of the work in the teaching room designed by architect Hans Hollein for the museum’s educational program. The parallel presentations create a contrast between the public museum setting and the more private, participatory environment of the school.

Born in Basel in 1984, Kaspar studied in Hamburg and Frankfurt and now lives between Zurich and Riga. His practice moves between photography, installation, publishing and institutional projects, often focusing on the social and cultural systems through which art is produced, circulated and given meaning. His work has been shown internationally at institutions including MAMCO Geneva, Kunsthalle Bern, Artists Space in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, FOUNDRY Seoul and the MadeIn Art Museum in Shanghai.

The exhibition opens on September 17 with events at both HUMA and Museum Abteiberg. The evening includes a conversation between Tobias Kaspar and HUMA students Karla Rady, Sina Meyer, Innarah Alt and Sophie Schwarz.

Unconditional runs from September 18 through November 29, 2026, at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach.