For the time being, the war in the Ukraine has had no effect on the exhibition planning at the Museum Hamburger Bahnhof.
The two new directors of the House for Contemporary Art of the State Museums said on Tuesday in Berlin.
Instead, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, who have taken on the management of a museum for the first time after numerous curatorial tasks in the international art world, want to place their aegis under the guiding principle of the journey.
"History, architecture, locality, diversity, innovation" would be the focus of their work, said Bardaouil and Fellrath when presenting their plans.
It's about telling the stories that need to be heard today.
However, Ukrainian art in particular is not one of them.
From June 2, the exhibition "Under Construction" will present fifteen new acquisitions, some of them large-format, by artists from Eastern and Western Europe and the Islamic world for the collection of the New National Gallery and at the same time make "Mechanisms of Exhibiting" the subject.
The special exhibition “Balance” then opens on June 10th, in which works of art from the Marx Collection, the National Gallery and loans by Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Andreas Gursky, Keith Haring, Anselm Kiefer, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and others can be seen will.
From June 11 to September 18, the Hamburger Bahnhof is one of the venues for the 12th Berlin Biennale, which aims, among other things, to formulate "decolonial strategies and practices for the present".
Fellrath and Bardaouil are hoping for a long-term solution for the Rieckhallen, which was sold to an Austrian real estate company in 2007 and was threatened with demolition before the state of Berlin and the investor agreed on a property swap the year before last.
In any case, Hamburger Bahnhof wants to “physically open up in all directions” and also take a look at the new neighborhood of Europacity north of Berlin Central Station.
The renovation of the historic main building of the museum is pending, but initially it is also possible to "work with rooms that are not quite perfect," explained Fellrath.