Danh Vō in Tea and Dry Biscuits. An Anniversary Exhibition
17 April 2025 —28 September 2025
Group exhibition at Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin, Germany
The year 2025 marks the 75th anniversary of the Georg Kolbe Museum. The exhibition conceptualized for this occasion takes the founding moment of the institution as its starting point: it opened its doors in 1950 as the first new museum in post-war West Berlin. At the time, the museum was fashioned as a memorial to the sculptor Georg Kolbe, who died in 1947 and who had lived and worked in Sensburger Allee from the time the extraordinary ensemble was built in 1928 onwards. The studio rooms, which were opened to the public in 1950, had seemingly remained untouched since Kolbe’s death. Numerous sculptures on display provided an insight into the artist’s entire oeuvre. Kolbe’s personal objects stylized the working and living space into an elevated place of worship.
The exhibition focuses on the staging of memories and examines remembrance in its various forms – private and public. Contemporary artists open up diverse perspectives on the past and present through their own reflections on the subject. What was remembered in 1950? How and what do we remember today and what forms does this remembrance take? On the one hand, the exhibition deals with a critical examination of the museum’s own institutional history, with imagined, perceived and lived (family) ties that had a lasting impact on the museum. On the other hand, the exhibition takes a self-reflexive look at the topic of museumization and the control, idealization and narration of history and memory.
In the Viewing Depot, visitors can gain an in-depth insight into the history of the Dancer’s Fountain, which now stands in the museum’s garden. Through Georg Kolbe’s artistic work and a moving history of objects, the fountain tells of the historical entanglements of the 20th century. It is inextricably linked to the fate of the family of Jewish art collector Heinrich Stahl, who commissioned the work in 1922. During the Nazi era, the Stahl family was persecuted and forced to sell their property, on which the fountain was located, for less than it was worth. After being dismembered and moved, the fountain was considered lost for a long time before it was rebuilt in its original form in the museum garden in 1979. The history of the fountain tells of the anti-Semitic policies of National Socialism. At the same time, the formal design refers to colonial power structures and their influence on the art of European modernism. In summer 2025, the publication The Fountain will be released, which will take an in-depth look at the Dancer’s Fountain and its history.
With works by Georg Kolbe and Christian Borchert, Cao Fei, Ryan Gander, Itamar Gov, Heike Kabisch, Taus Makhacheva, Laure Prouvost, Hande Sever, Kaari Upson, Álvaro Urbano, Marion Verboom, Danh Vō and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt.