HERE AND NOW AT MUSEUM LUDWIG: ANTI-COLONIAL INTERVENTIONS

The eighth project in the exhibition series “HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig” embarks on an anti-colonial journey through the permanent collection. 

HERE AND NOW AT MUSEUM LUDWIG: ANTI-COLONIAL INTERVENTIONS

Together with the artists Daniela Ortiz (b. 1985 in Peru), Paula Baeza Pailamilla (b. 1988 in Chile), Pável Aguilar (b. 1989 in Honduras), and Paloma Ayala (b. 1980 in Mexico), the Museum Ludwig will take a critical and curious look at artistic positions from Latin America. What Latin American artists are in the collection? How do modernist artists—most of whom are European—reproduce the exoticizing view of the global South? Which works should be critically questioned, and which offer counter-models?

In her art, Daniela Ortiz is committed to an anti-racist and anti-colonial discourse. In her painting she shows her own perspective on Max Ernst’s The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus (1921). Paula Baeza Pailamilla is a Mapuche artist and deals with the cultural practices of her indigenous ancestors, among other topics. She is interested in collective actions that locate one’s own body politically, socially, and historically. For the exhibition, Baeza Pailamilla developed a performance and video installation dealing with chocolate production. The starting point for the founding of the museum in 1976 was a donation from Peter and Irene Ludwig, whose fortune primarily came from the multinational production and sale of chocolate.

The sound artist Pável Aguilar will intervene in the museum’s permanent collection with sound sculptures and installations. The artist Paloma Ayala will create clay figures that visitors can touch, which will be continually expanded and altered over the course of the exhibition. Director Yilmaz Dziewior says: “I am delighted that the exhibition shows the current relevance and urgency of anti-colonial perspectives on museum collections. By juxtaposting our collection display with artistic interventions, common narratives become productively questioned”.

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