Skulptur Projekte Münster 2027 Announces 13 More Commissions by Artists Including Kapwani Kiwanga, Ali Cherri, and Nolan Oswald Dennis

Skulptur Projekte Münster has announced 13 additional artist commissions that will appear across the German city when its sixth edition opens next year.

Opening in June, this upcoming iteration marks the decennial public art exhibition’s 50th anniversary and will be the first one organized since the death of Skulptur Projekte cofounder Kasper König in 2024. The curatorial collective What, How & for Whom / WHW (consisting of Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović) will serve as artistic director.

At the core of the exhibition will be the Peace of Westphalia, the 1648 treaty that ended the Thirty Years’ War and was partially negotiated in Münster. Since then, the city has adopted a motto of “peace through dialogue.” The curators contrast that history with “Münster’s involvement in Europe’s long history of violent combat” as well as plan to address the present moment of “a world shaped by wars and smouldering conflicts,” per a release.

“Informed by the history of Münster as ‘City of Westphalian Peace,’ the artists of Skulptur Projekte 2027 are developing their proposals in awareness of the violence of the present, considering the political decisions, historical global relations, and economic systems that have shaped it,” WHW said in a statement. “Against the ruptures and losses of recent years, the exhibition asks not only what art can show, but what it can hold. In times when cancellations, censorship, and withdrawal have constrained cultural work, Skulptur Projekte seeks to make room for voices to be heard, for losses to be mourned, for consolation, and for alternatives to be proposed.”

Among the newly announced commissions are ones by Ali Cherri, Kapwani Kiwanga, Nolan Oswald Dennis, and Kosen Ohtsubo. Cherri will create several large-scale sculptures for the garden of the Officers’ Casino, part of the Gremmendorf military barracks that were built by the Nazis and used by the British military until 2012. Kiwanga’s project will look at the “ambiguous force of water,” from its nourishing properties to its destructive ones like the 1660 flooding of Münster by the Prince Bishop.

For his commission, Dennis will map the neighborhood of Berg Fidel, in southern Münster, “onto the cosmos and vice versa, constructing an observatory as a hyper-local calendric device,” according to a release. Ohtsubo, who has studied ikebana since the 1960s, will use local apple trees that have been cut down once they are no longer able to bear fruit and transform them into a large-scale installation in the center of Münster.

“An artwork in the public space need not compete for visibility in an already overly saturated world; it can offer time to witness, to feel, and to stay with what cannot readily be resolved,” WHW continued in its statement. “At a moment when political and economic propositions struggle to make a positive future imaginable, the faint hope of Skulptur Projekte 2027 is that such encounters with art in public space might allow for perspectives to be felt and acknowledged that are often misrepresented or obscured, without forcing consensus where none exists.”

The full list of announced commissions follows below. An asterisk indicates a previously announced commission.

Mercedes Azpilicueta
Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann
Ali Cherri
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Róza El-Hassan*
Kapwani Kiwanga
Natascha Sadr Haghighian
Vlatka Horvat
Iman Issa
Anton Kats
Hew Locke*
Oscar Murillo*
Myvillages
Kosen Ohtsubo
Khalil Rabah
Ashfika Rahman
Selma Selman*
Iza Tarasewicz*