In 2025, the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg celebrates its 50th anniversary: half a century of artistic engagement, social reflection, and cultural transformation. Since its founding, the museum has been dedicated to contemporary art – both then and now. From the state-controlled art policy of the GDR to the democratic awakening of 1989 to the international outlook of recent decades, the museum tells a story of continual change.

This development is also reflected in the collection: many works were created in times of social upheaval. They bear witness to closeness and distance, to separation and togetherness as something fragile and constantly under challenge. Under the title CHALLENGED TOGETHERNESS, the anniversary exhibition brings together artworks that highlight individuality, contradiction, and the multiplicity of societal voices. Key works from the collection enter into dialogue with contemporary positions, some of which have been newly created for this exhibition.

Together, these works explore the complexity of community and encourage reflection on both historical and current forms of coexistence. Togetherness is never a given – it must be renegotiated time and again. The artworks reveal the ambivalences, challenge familiar patterns of thought, and probe the boundaries between individual and collective memory.

Spread across the museum’s entire exhibition space, CHALLENGED TOGETHERNESS presents a multifaceted panorama of painting, photography, video art, installations, graphics, and sculpture. The exhibition spans five decades – from the artistic practices of the 20th century and the societal shifts following 1989 to today’s forms of communal life. At its heart are questions of community and togetherness – and the role each individual plays within it.

Artists from the collection: Özlem Altın, Giovanni Anselmo, Johanna Bartl, Horst Bartnig, Christian Boltanski, Sergey Bratkov, Peter Bräuning/Grit Bümann/Ansgar Frerich, Heinz Breloh, Joachim Brohm, Ernesto Burgos, Anthony Caro, Lawrence Carroll, Enrico Castellani, William Christenberry, Johan Creten, Hartwig Ebersbach, Jonas Englert, Brian Eno, Ruth Francken, Nan Goldin, Monika Huber, Leiko Ikemura, Sanja Iveković, Sven Johne, Rashid Johnson, Annika Kahrs, Koji Kamoji, Jens Klein, Jannis Kounellis, Wieland Krause, Lore Krüger, Hans-Wulf Kunze, Rolf Lindemann, David Lynch, Christiane Möbus, Maurizio Nannucci, Norbert Prangenberg, Lucas Reiner, Raffael Rheinsberg, Xanti Schawinsky, Michael Schmidt, Baldur Schönfelder, Jochen Seidel, Christopher J. Smith, Hito Steyerl, Gabriele Stötzer, Werner Stötzer, Zandile Tshabalala, Max Uhlig, Olaf Wegewitz, Tobias Zielony, Gilberto Zorio
Invited positions by: Isaac Chong Wai, Itamar Gov, Marina Naprushkina, Diane Severin Nguyen, Elske Rosenfeld

For “Infra Voice” the artist worked with infrasound, with frequencies below approximately 20 Hertz, so low that they are barely discernible to the human ear. A number of species of animal communicate using these tones, including giraffes. Our image of elegant giants striding gracefully across the savannah is no doubt affected by the fact that the animals appear mute to us. With “Infra Voice” Kahrs gives them a voice, and not via the transposition of their sounds and noises into the audible range, but instead through music.

The fact that human perception in the infrasound range has come up against its limits does not mean that people have not attempted to venture into this sphere. In 1850 the violin maker Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume invented the octobass, the largest stringed instrument ever constructed, expanding the options for compositions in the bass range. An octobass weighs well over one hundred kilograms and measures nearly four metres. It is played like a double bass, though the strings are not plucked but rather pressed with bows that are operated using handles and foot pedals. The instrument failed to establish itself, but a number of them still exist, together with replicas. Kahrs developed her video installation from the strange correlation between giraffe communication and the curious string instrument.

Taking stock of the dimensions of her protagonists, she confronted the giraffes at the Hagenbeck zoo in Hamburg with a composition for octobass specially written by the Norwegian Guro Skumsnes Moe. On the basis of simple analogies – size, form, sound – in the spatial installation of three upright format canvases a complex interaction develops from the visual connections, the micro-perspectives when touching instrument and animal and the passing of time over the course of a day, until the twilight of the giraffes.

The sculptures thus become resonating bodies that produce a scale ranging from the low tones of the pelvic diaphragm to the high tones of the head. The vibrations of the tones set the water surface in motion. These fluid choreographies culminate in a polyphonic vocal composition that merges the visible waves with the sound space in the monastery church. Hesitant and serious, the voices pass through various emotional and evolutionary states. The breath of the pre-human verses multiplies in the polyphony, surpassing the youthful lamentations and ghostly cries, the heaviness of the sonic obscenities and the lightness of the premonitions.

Dâmaso's installation draws on spiritual tradition, including the work of Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207–1282). In her magnum opus “The Flowing Light of Divinity”, she develops a metaphor of flow that connects body, space and transcendence. For Our Flowing Voices; I Amphorae creates a connection between the physical flow of voices, the material resonances of the sculptures, and the historical site, which enters into the poetic exploration of flowing knowledge.

Lara Dâmaso's work spans ephemeral and permanent forms, taking shape through the mediums of performance, sound, video, sewing, sculpture, photography and text. Dâmaso’s practice focuses on the sensitive and vibratory dialogue between humans and the space they inhabit. She delves into the interconnectedness of the tangible and intangible, exploring the direct relationship between the movement of the voice and that of the body. This connection aims to establish a direct and emotional form of communication. Her approach is based on the concept of listening as total presence, essential to activating such a dialogue. Transformation, the plurality of the self, fluidity and interdependence, as consequences of this exchange, lie at the very core of her creative process.

After several years‘ intensive training in ballet and contemporary dance, Lara Dâmaso attended the Leipzig Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst where she studied art and media and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Lara Dâmaso‘s work has been presented in a variety of institutions and festivals, including Biennale Son, Kunsthalle Wien, Movement Festival, Eaton Hong Kong, Atonal Berlin, Basel Social Club, Triennale Milano, We Travel to Know Our Own Geography – Terraforma x Kuboraum (60th Venice Art Biennale), DeSingel, Centre Pompidou, Tanzquartier Wien, Gessnerallee, Krone Couronne, Istituto Svizzero, Kunsthalle Bern, MASI Lugano, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Kunsthalle Zürich, Cabaret Voltaire.

Photographers Katrin Freund, Elisabeth Heinemann, Hans-Wulf Kunze and Thomas Sasse have portrayed ‘contemporaries’ of the museum. The resulting photographs are supplemented by personal stories, offering compelling insights into individual life stories as well as the development of the city. Some of those portrayed have remained in their hometown, others have returned here or found a new home far away. Together, they paint a picture of a generation that, like no other, has experienced change, new beginnings and deep roots.

The exhibition is part of the anniversary programme ‘Challenged Community’, with which the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg is celebrating its 50th anniversary. This anniversary exhibition takes up central themes of our present and searches for the essence of community. For community can never be taken for granted, but must be constantly renegotiated, shaped and lived – as the exhibition ‘Born in 1975’ also makes clear.

The work deals with the themes of authoritarianism, myth and epistemology. By linking historical events, philosophical ideas and local legends, Gov's project questions the fragile boundaries between fact and fiction, memory and imagination.

Karl-Heinz Adler. Erasmus Schröter. Carsten Nicolai. Marta Dyachenko

The ambivalent building material concrete, which carries within it the creative process as well as the entire spectrum between destruction, reconstruction and environmental catastrophe, has long moved and challenged artists. Opération Béton ("Operation Concrete") is the title of French experimental filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's first film, which was released in 1954. The enormous versatility and usability of the building material made of cement, rock and water allows endless possibilities for its application in architecture and art.

In times of climate crisis, however, the modern building material, whose range of applications seems limitless, is always associated with the man-made disasters of this world. While Karl-Heinz Adler's moulded stone systems stand for the reinterpretation of the material in a time of reconstruction, the ambivalence between decay and preservation becomes the omnipresent theme of a musical and visual intervention in Carsten Nicolai's video ‘Betonschiff ohne Namen’.

For his photographs, Erasmus Schröter staged the bunkers of the ‘Atlantic Wall’, built from millions of tonnes of concrete and commissioned by the German occupation in 1942, in coloured light, creating an ambivalent atmosphere between past megalomania, threat and ridicule. This is intensified in the present in view of modern air-to-ground missiles, portable anti-tank weapons and military conflicts that have become more perfidious. Preservation and destruction, but also the great possibilities of creating something new from the past, have become a theme for the artist Marta Dyachenko and her sculptures made of moulded concrete in recent years. The complex relationship between nature and man and the socially constructed view of what is and will be is reflected in exemplary fashion in the artworks, which are combined with concrete as a building material characterised by opportunities and disasters in equal measure.

Karl-Heinz Adler (1927 Remtengrün/Vogtland - 2018 Dresden) was a painter, graphic artist and conceptual artist and is now considered one of the most outstanding representatives of concrete art in Germany. His paper collages, object layers, drawings and models for the moulded stone systems he had made from concrete can be seen in this exhibition.

Erasmus Schröter (1956 Leipzig - 2021 Leipzig) was a photographer who initially worked in Leipzig, from 1985 in Hamburg and from the mid-1990s back in Leipzig, whose motifs range from surreal-looking everyday GDR imagery to conceptual series full of subtlety and irony.

Carsten Nicolai (*1965 Karl-Marx-Stadt/Chemnitz, lives in Berlin) is a German media artist and musician (pseudonym Alva Noto) who works as a border crosser at the interface between visual art, science and music. His often large-scale audiovisual installations aim to make invisible phenomena such as sound and light frequencies tangible.

Marta Dyachenko (*1990 in Kiev, lives in Berlin) studied architecture, fine arts and sculpture in Berlin. Her installations of model-like sculptures in concrete raise questions about the relationship between nature and man as well as the socially constructed view of the landscape.

The installation draws on the architectural language of religious ritual and the performative dynamics of political speech. From the pulpit-like structure, a newly composed piece emanates, developed specifically for the church. In this composition, Bultheel weaves modal tonalities of the Middle Ages with contemporary sonic textures. Through delicate motifs, drifting resonances, and intentional repetition, the piece generates a charged atmosphere in which historical echoes become audible and contemporary urgencies resonate.

Accompanying the sound are a series of new wooden panels, recalling the detail and drama of medieval wood carving. These works portray inner states of apocalyptic life—rebellion, passivity, and escapism—sculpted as allegorical figures.

Influenced by Emil Cioran’s bleak aphorisms on the collapse of reason and the illusion of progress, and shaped by deep historical inquiry into authority, community, and belief, Bultheel’s installation becomes an exploration of sonic beauty and dissonant rupture. Within the charged stillness of the monastic church, the work opens a space for polyphonic memory and acoustic imagination—a fragile equilibrium between contemplation and unrest.

Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer Andrius Arutiunian presents a new version of his large-scale installation Under the Cold Sun (2024/25). Working with the architecture of the historic monastery church of the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, the work relies on two essential materials—light and sound—to create its hypnotic state.

In Under the Cold Sun, Arutiunian explores the clashes between historical narratives and contemporary imaginaries. At the center of the piece are three elements—a mirror, a light, and a synthetic organ—three ghostly presences permeating the former monastery’s space. Working with psychoacoustics and light reflections, Under the Cold Sun continues the artist’s exploration of vernacular knowledges, alternate methods of world-ordering, and concepts of musical and political attunement.

Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer Andrius Arutiunian (*1991) represented Armenia at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 with the solo exhibition Gharīb. His works have also been exhibited at major biennials and museums, including the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris), M HKA (Antwerp), Sapieha Palace (Vilnius), FACT (Liverpool) and the Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius). In 2024 he was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize, and in 2023 he was a DAAD Artist-in-Residence Fellow. Arutiunian's work combines hypnotic sound structures, synthetic sounds and cultural sound languages, creating an experience that is both aesthetically sophisticated and emotionally tangible.

Knotted together, intertwined, clasped - this is how Hans Hendrik Grimmling repeatedly depicts his subject, the human drama of existence, the struggle, the tragedy. It is the people who struggle with each other, who suffer, who despair and who draw hope that interest him. For Grimmling, art is not an accessory, but something universal, something urgently necessary. ‘It is the salvation of life,’ he says.

The exhibition explores the foundations of his painting, the origin of the painterly processes that create forms from colours and the power that is expressed in his pictures. Using only a few colours, mainly black, red, yellow and white, Grimmling's work moves between figurative representation and abstraction. The strong rhythm of the forms is constantly reassembled into typical motifs such as the head, hand, bird and knot, visualising the fragile side of humanity. At the same time, his pictures are refuges, moments of fixation.

Starting with some important early works by the painter from the beginning of the 1980s, the exhibition is dedicated to the artist's entire oeuvre in four large chapters. From the extensive work complex of Knots (1990s) and the group of works German Everyday Life (2007) to the paintings of the 2000s, which are strongly characterised by gestures, to the present day, it spans the arc from the early motifs to abstraction and the recurring bird and mask paintings of 2017-2024.

Hans-Hendrik Grimmling (*1947 in Zwenkau near Leipzig) was one of the initiators of the legendary “Erster Leipziger Herbstsalon” in 1984, an exhibition that is considered a milestone in the history of non-conformist GDR art. Grimmling left for West Berlin in 1986 in connection with the repression surrounding the ‘Herbstsalon’. From 2001, he taught there at the Technischen Kunsthochschule Berlin, from 2006 until his retirement in 2017 as professor emeritus.

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Nevin Aladağ is known for her works in which she playfully and poetically combines sound, installation, video, performance, patterns and ornaments as well as humour. The exhibition ‘The Rolling Tambourine’ at the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg shows video and textile works by the artist.