ESSEN.- This year is the 50th anniversary of the high-water mark of the hippy movement: the 1967 ‘Summer of Love’ in San Francisco. Against a backdrop of serious racial unrest, the Vietnam War, and a consumer-oriented society, there emerged a genuine counter-culture that strove to find new ways for people and countries to co-exist. Visitors to San Francisco 1967 at the Museum Folkwang can enjoy the largest poster exhibition on the Summer of Love so far held anywhere in Europe.

Arwed Messmer. RAF – No Evidence / Kein Beweis
Much has been written and told from a journalistic, historical, literary, and cinematic perspective about the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) and the "German Autumn" of 1977. For his latest work, the photographer and image archaeologist Arwed Messmer adopts a photographic point of view to explore this particular chapter of West German history. Messmer’s work starts off with the various kinds of pictures taken by police photographers—photos of demonstrations, pictures of crime scenes, and images taken by officers for reconnaissance purposes or while on duty—which the artist unearthed while looking through a number of state archives. He then employs an artistic process to appropriate the images for his own purposes, underlining the original function served by these crime-scene photographs, while also laying bear their destructive potential.

Peggy Buth. The Politics of Selection
Peggy Buth’s exhibition The Politics of Selection recounts a political story of our cities and suburbs. The artist understands urban space as somewhere overlain by social and economic forces, becoming both shaped and deformed in the process. Over the course of three chapters, Buth bears witness to social utopias and economic interests, attempts at integration and exclusion, hope—but also discrimination and smear campaigns. The subject of her artistic investigations are the suburbs of Paris and the social housing projects and urban streetlife in the US state of Missouri. Buth has expanded the scope of her documentary exploration for the exhibition at the Museum Folkwang to include the Ruhr region, after having worked in Essen and Duisburg.