From Friday 18 July, a former power plant in Chemnitz will be the venue for the Begehungen art festival. The exhibition will showcase 32 international artistic positions until 17 August. Under the title Everything is Interaction, the art festival focuses on topics such as resource consumption, species loss and the climate crisis. Works by artists such as Lara Almarcegui, Olaf Nicolai, Henrike Naumann, Uriel Orlow, Ursula Biemann, Gregor Schneider, Paulo Tavares, Daniel Otero Torres, Günther and Loredana Selichar and Hito Steyerl will be on display. They deal with the social, ecological and economic consequences of environmental destruction, with questions of justice and power and the associated social discourses. A good quarter of the works, such as the wind installation by Rikuo Ueda, were created on a site-specific basis as part of residencies.
The exhibition is complemented by a festival programme with concerts, readings, lectures and performances. The Begehungen art festival has been taking place in Chemnitz since 2003. It takes place at different locations each year and is part of the European Capital of Culture Chemnitz 2025 programme this year.
The programme of the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in the European Capital of Culture year
The major exhibitions of the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz have an important place in the diverse art programme of Chemnitz 2025. On 10 August, the exhibition Edvard Munch. Angst opens in the art collections on Theaterplatz. Until then, the successful show European Realities, which is dedicated to the diverse realism movements of the 1920s and 1930s on an unprecedented scale, can still be seen at the Gunzenhauser Museum. The Karl Schmidt-Rottluff ensemble, consisting of a country house and residential mill belonging to the family of the Chemnitz-born artist, was renovated as an urban development project for Chemnitz 2025 and opened as a museum in April. On 24 August, the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz will celebrate a "Festival of Expressionism" there. During the Capital of Culture year, the art collections will also present an exhibition on the artist group Clara Mosch (1977-1982) and the Galerie Oben, which opposed the official cultural scene in the GDR and developed Karl-Marx-Stadt into a hotspot for the alternative art scene.
Urban art for Chemnitz 2025
From 28 August to 21 September, the Hallenkunst project in the historic Chemnitz market hall will showcase a wide range of international artistic positions that draw inspiration from street culture and graffiti - a movement that was "born as a crisis phenomenon" and spread as a subculture, but never really became an art genre. Under the title ART IN TRANSIT AND BEYOND, the HALLENKUNST project aims to analyse the complex influence of graffiti and the subway art movement on today's art world. For over 40 years, this subculture and its protagonists have been influencing and mixing various creative forms of expression such as pop art, painting, photography, illustration, design, music and art in public spaces. More than 70 artists from Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark and the USA are taking part in the group exhibition, including Jasmin HERA Siddiqui, Samy Deluxe, Hendrik Beikirch, Jan Kalab, CMP ONE, Dondi, Futura2000, Lars Teichmann, Claudia MadC Walde and many more.
In the run-up to the festival, eight facades and surfaces in Chemnitz's public space have already been created with free works by international artists as part of the Hallenkunst public mural programme and are visible from afar.
As a festival for urban art, ibug2025 (short for Industrie-Brachen-Um-Gestaltung) will be taking over a former hospital in Chemnitz over three weekends from 22 August to 7 September. In its 20th edition, ibug will once again turn a relic of Saxony's industrial culture into a temporary canvas for artists from all over the world. Originally built as the Presto-Werke and later used by Auto-Union AG as its headquarters, the site was converted into a hospital after the Second World War. The so-called "Krankenhaus Stadtpark" was closed in 1997 and has been empty ever since. A total of 70 artists, duos and collectives from 25 countries have been invited to Chemnitz to design three buildings and the inner courtyard of the former hospital as a festival site with their works. The spectrum of art ranges from large-scale murals, paste-ups and illustrations to installations and multimedia projects.
Art in the Capital of Culture region
At the same time, one of the most extensive and lasting projects for Chemnitz 2025 is growing in the Capital of Culture region: the PURPLE PATH art and sculpture trail. With the works of renowned regional, national and international artists, a unique exhibition is being created in a rural public space that creates a symbolic connection between the 39 municipalities of the Capital of Culture Region and Chemnitz over a distance of around 400 kilometres. Curator Alexander Ochs has brought works by Alice Aycock, Tony Cragg, Leiko Ikemura, Olaf Holzapfel, Nevin Aladağ, Via Lewandowsky and Leunora Salihu, among others, to the region. To mark the end of the Capital of Culture year, a work of light art by James Turrell will be opened on the site of a former coal mine and now the KohleWelt Museum.
Until the end of November, Rebecca Horn's work The Universe in a Pearl can be seen as a temporary installation on the PURPLE PATH art and sculpture trail in the Hospitalkirche in Lößnitz.
The exhibition Sonnensucher! on art and mining at Wismut in Zwickau, which is taking place in cooperation with Chemnitz 2025, will be extended until 26 October due to the high level of interest.
