Curated by Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke

Nature or network? This was the question haunting 1960s California. And the answer was, of course, both. Ecology and technology were seen as part of a single teeming system, hopefully headed toward homeostasis: Counterculturalists led the search for a universal equilibrium between tools and worlds, minds and machines and energies, as a way of remaking the postwar world in all its crisis and promise. This exhibition endeavors to trace that quest, taking as its figurehead Stewart Brand—impresario and visionary creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, that manual for life in the nuclear age. With an eclectic range of more than forty works by artists from then and now, including Eleanor Antin, Bruce Yonemoto, and the Otolith Group, curators Franke and Diederichsen aim to tell the story of how the West tuned in, dropped out, and became Silicon Valley.

— Michelle Kuo

Curated by Susanne Pfeffer with Klaus Biesenbach and Anna-Catharina Gebbers

Whereas the Fifty-Fourth Venice Biennale’s German pavilion staged a requiem for Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010), this first retrospective dedicated to the auteur, theater maker, opera director, and performer promises to throw the relentless vitality of his boundary-crossing oeuvre into relief. The exhibition, which will remain open day and night for the show’s duration, will offer not only a rich selection of Schlingensief’s filmic works but also several impromptu contributions by his longtime collaborators—a plan poised to accommodate the artist’s patently idiosyncratic fusion of Actionism, Fluxus, “social sculpture,” and the inanities of spectacle culture. A catalogue with essays by the curators and Elfriede Jelinek, Tilda Swinton, and Alexander Kluge, among others, will further elucidate the tactics and legacy of this pivotal figure of postreunification Germany.

— André Rottmann