His gaze falls on an advertising text which had been put up on posters all around the city prior to the 1972 Olympic Games. In giant letters, the slogan “München wird modern” (Munich goes modern) was there to announce various urban-planning measures, including the extension of the subway system. Yet instead of seeing in this the promise of a bright future, the person from Welsch’s book – presumably the author himself – suddenly reads the exact opposite: “Munich will decay,” as the German verb modern denotes decomposition. One would be hard pressed to find a better or more humorous description for the inner workings of different perspectives. Making a decisive contribution to the various possible readings is not only the context, that is, the environment in which something is interpreted, but also one’s own state of mind – in this case perhaps the feeling that not much new was actually happening in Munich at the time.

At any rate, the postmodernist discussion may well be on the verge of being kindled anew. The Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn got to the heart of the matter in its announcement of the exhibition Everything at Once: Post-Modernity, 1967–1992 (29.09.2023 – 28.01.2024): “Architects declared the amusement park the new ideal city; designers shook off the yoke of good taste, and the conflict between the two dominant political systems gave way to the struggle for self-realisation. New media synchronised the globe, images became the arena in which contests for style and recognition were waged.” Even if our present day is considerably more drab and less playful, it doesn’t take much imagination to trace the development of these lines from then to now: commercialisation of cities, globalisation, digitalisation, and the waning of solidarity when it comes to social matters.

On a positive note, with the knowledge of plurality also came an awareness that something like a shared public – as suggested by the phrasing art in public space – does not actually exist, but that the perception and use of public space is based on different ways of addressing and experiencing it. What is more, the public sphere is permeated by subtle and less subtle codifications, which provide input on which people and which behaviours are desired – or not – at a given time or place. Accordingly, many sites are less inviting from the perspective of women, queer or racialised persons, senior citizens, homeless individuals, or people with disabilities. Public spaces where a gamut of very different people all feel welcome and at ease are sadly not a given – such spaces must be actively created.

This line of thought brings me to my calling in the Ruhr area, where in January 2018 I took over the Artistic Direction of Urbane Künste Ruhr. My goal at the time was – and still remains today – to create, and make experienceable, aesthetic and political contexts through art projects in the public spaces of this polycentric Ruhr region. This also means acknowledging the plurality of the (hi)stories lived here, as well as interweaving and interrelating them. Still today, the canon of the area’s successful transformation from a former industrial region into a lush cultural landscape – a path that started with the International Building Exhibition Emscher Park (IBA Emscher Park) – is a narrative of the white middle class.

The Urbane Künste Ruhr projects – carried out in collaboration with countless artists and artist groups at many sites – have required a great deal of sensitivity to each respective context. The endeavours are often designed to interlink various temporal layers: traces of the past become visible within the present. At the same time, ideas and desires for the present and the future can emerge through an exploration of local topics. Contemporary art functions as a hinge between the two poles of a romanticised past and a not-yet-redeemed future, poles that are especially powerful in the Ruhr valley. Artistic thought, research, and action are interdisciplinarily compatible in many different directions. And when everything comes together in an ideal way, this nexus is able, as a counterpart both critical and benevolent in equal measure, to bring complex interdependencies into focus.

This may all sound quite wonderful, and the following pages present vivid impressions of how many outstanding projects have taken place over the past six years. All the same, there were days when touches of melancholy stole in, faced with the wide-ranging social issues, the sheer size of the region, and the tristesse of the built environment. At some point, I started to cheer myself up with dreams of creating a yet-to-be-written book called Montage im Ruhrgebiet, though even this text operates like a picture puzzle. If the word Montage is read as the day of a week, as “Mondays,” it epitomises a working day, a new beginning full of hope and agony at the very same time. The term Montage, in turn, which in English has various meanings, such as “assembling” or “installing,” describes something that is full of action, a handicraft or trade, but most especially, for instance in the context of film editing, the fostering of fascinating connections. In anticipation of this imaginary book, a kind of “relationship novel” between art and public(s), which most likely will never be published, I’ve borrowed the eloquent title for this foreword.

The chronological order of the publications released by Urbane Künste Ruhr from the years 2019 to 2023 clearly reveal the process of engaging with various major exhibition projects, and also how topics from the region have been addressed. Reactions to the incisive events of recent years within society, such as the coronavirus pandemic or Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, are intuitively rendered. However, the last magazine was already in print on October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel, which is why the escalation of violence and the war in the Middle East are not mentioned in the present volume. The collection of already printed magazines presented here is quite the opposite of a nice and tidy coffee-table book, for it permanently documents trials and tribulations, shock, and empathy in real time.

A pivotal role is played by the Ruhr Ding trilogy, which was held every two years and ended in the early summer of 2023. With a format conceived specifically for the Ruhr area, this travelling biennial each time connected four cities in the area’s middle, north, or south, respectively. Projects that were almost exclusively developed to be site- and context-specific were presented, around twenty each time. This type of large-scale exhibition was accompanied by the wish to invite a broad, heterogeneous audience, from within the Ruhr region and from outside areas as well. After a successful start with the Territorien (Territories) in 2019, the Covid years arrived. For the Klima (Climate) issue in May/June 2021, this meant that the opening could only play out in stages, and the project was marked by a sense of general uncertainty and by a shorter duration overall. The Schlaf (Sleep) edition in 2023, in turn, enjoyed a wealth of visitors, all the way up to the very last exhibition day.

From the outset it was clear that, this time too, all projects would have to be dismantled after just eight weeks of exhibition time, as stipulated in the contracts. Just a few projects are still extant today as physical Ruhr Ding legacies: Stefan Marx’s murals in several cities, three of the trees planted by the artist Deborah Ligorio at the Silbersee, and the photosynthesis clock by Club Real installed at Theater Consol in Gelsenkirchen. From the perspective of sustainability, such a scheme with long lead times and a comparatively short duration of the exhibition seems more and more anachronistic to me. It is for this reason that we will be forging new paths with Urbane Künste Ruhr from 2024 to 2027. Here is a little sneak preview: We aim on the one hand to condense the artistic and curatorial activities in our immediate surroundings to a state of greater depth, while, on the other, more strongly mobilising and performatively accelerating various artistic ideas.

Complementing the temporary Ruhr Ding trilogy in the magazines is the Emscherkunstweg as recurring theme, a permanent sculpture path along the river Emscher, which was conceived as a cooperative project between the Emschergenossenschaft, the Regionalverband Ruhr (RVR), and Urbane Künste Ruhr. With the Emscherkunstweg-ABC – a growing glossary of subject-specific and associative terms – we have been engaging with the modern – or decaying – Emscher from the very beginning, and from different perspectives. Various experts have their say, such as the water resource and management engineers who have spent the last thirty years restoring the river from an open sewer to a nearly natural body of water, our colleagues from the Regionalverband, and, of course, the team of Urbane Künste Ruhr. The entire alphabet will soon be available for reading in the forthcoming catalogue Emscherkunstweg.

With this extensive publication, we are ultimately recognising the entire universe of Urbane Künste Ruhr, and hence all involved artists, colleagues, and associated authors, augmented by a comprehensive index that makes it possible to comb through the nine magazines published here according to sites and people. The conceptual development of this compendium was enormously enjoyable, and my warm thanks go to Alisha Raissa Danscher and Kerstin Finkel from Urbane Künste Ruhr for the productive collaboration, to the designer Florian Lamm, who with his partner Jakob Kirch has also been responsible for the graphic design of all the magazines, and to June Drevet for her equally well-thought-out and meticulous development of the index. Warm gratitude is likewise extended to the Kultur Ruhr GmbH and our supporters, the State of North Rhine–Westphalia and the Regionalverband Ruhr, along with all cooperation partners and the publishing house BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE. The big, colourful book that you are holding in your hands now is only masquerading as a book. It is actually a kaleidoscope: every search, every act of leafing through, gives rise to a new picture of what it means to work artistically in the Ruhr area.

by Britta Peters