On Friday September 6, I found myself wide awake in the middle of the night, barely before the clock struck three a.m., racing to Lisbon airport. This brief trip to Munich would also be the first time I stepped foot on German soil – personally, a visit that took on a certain magnitude as I expected Various Others to be a highlight not only of the Bavarian capital’s art scene, but also of Germany’s cultural and historical heritage. The three days I spent there would not, of course, be sufficient to fulfil that promise: in 2024, more than 200 artists were on show, plus 11 additions to the already lengthy list of institutions that took part in last year’s edition – including galleries, museums and artist-run venues -, densifying the network of partnerships and encounters made possible by the initiative. From the more than twenty kilometres walked every day through the Munich city centre – projected as an arts map by the Filter platform, a new feature of Various Others – to a pile of accumulated exhibition texts and business cards, learning about the city was only achieved through and from art. But even what (and how) we saw between four walls was tainted by what we heard on the streets.

The morning of the previous day, the Thursday of Various Others’ official opening and the kick-off to the contemporary art rentrée in Munich, an eighteen-year-old Austrian had shot at the Israeli consulate and the NS-Dokumentationszentrum, an art and education institution based on the site that once housed the “Brown House”, the Nazi Party’s former headquarters, dealing with the history of the regime. The alleged terrorist attack led to an armed conflict in the public square, the death of the suspect by the German police and the shutting down of the Documentation Centre for two days. That same afternoon, not too far from the clash, the largest exhibition ever staged by the Russian activist collective Pussy Riot opened at the Haus der Kunst, almost clandestinely. Unveiled at LSK-Galerie – a bunker annexed to the building that stands for the first great Nazi architectural commission – Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia converts the memory of that space into a sort of confidential diary of the struggle against the Putin government, rife with colour, liveliness, music and friendship and complicity bonds. The retrospective on the walls includes Masha Aljochina’s handwriting, a member of the group that spent three weeks staging Pussy Riot’s first exhibition in Germany. Her attendance at the vernissage inspired braveness, but nevertheless there was some unease. It was kept under wraps until the last moment, as the museum’s promoters were afraid of sabotage or manifestations that would endanger the safety of those involved. It was September 5, the 52nd anniversary of the Munich Olympic Games massacre.

Those were the headlines that haunted my first few hours in the city. The underlying tension was revealed through informal conversations during the first lunch for the press and local cultural agents, gently and carefully guided by Christian Ganzenberg, director of Various Others. The intimacy with which the different opportunities for exchange and socialising are orchestrated is also a major factor that sets this event apart, as it never fails to lend a personal and warm tone even to the ultimate attempts at commercial dealings between the artistic community. At the event, every entity is given a name and a face, as if they are fully aware that, with terror on the agenda, humanising the other is hardly the norm.

Not surprisingly, several of the exhibitions in this new edition turn to the realm of intimacy – sometimes expressed in its domestic dimension and at other times in the friction between the skins of the individual and social bodies. Nikolas Ventourakis’ Unlikely Outcomes. A feast for the eyes, regales us with stories, at the Britta Rettberg Gallery, in collaboration with the Athenian gallery Callirrhoë, presents scenes from a kitchen that has become both a universal archive and a plastic abstraction in photography. Interestingly, sinks, dishes and food reappear as aesthetic motifs – this time in paint and not camera lenses – in Try-Outs, Helene Appel’s third solo show at the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery. Both exhibitions reflect an attentive and careful look at the nuances of mundane compositions, diverting the focus to the objects that enact and make possible that interior realm: Emanuele Coccia once told us that everything becomes a subject inside the house[1]. All is vested with an unconscious and voluntary animism. To some extent, everything becomes human.

Two independent spaces, NEBYULA by Rosa Stern and space n.n., shed even more light on the way in which the intimacy of life inevitably and inextricably crosses over into public life. In the former, Jonas Höschl’s installation Why Are You Crying? alludes to Richard Prince’s 1988 homonymous piece – one of several auctioned off by princess and socialite Gloria von Thurn und Taxis in a bid to save her family empire from bankruptcy. The question, printed on a canvas in bold letters, is an acute one, posing concerns about both the overbearing nature of the art market and the value of tears and human drama in a context of dire inequality. From the castle to the hostel: in the latter, the exhibition venue opens its doors with six bunk beds, where twelve artists from Vienna display their works during the day and sleep at night. Right in front, a mobile kitchen is used by Munich artists to cook meals for the Viennese guests, relying also on donations and support from nearby establishments. vacancy is a prime example of how art can raise questions and answers to the housing crisis and hospitality regulations, offering us another expression of what could be an Economy of Intimacy.

Concretely, that is the title of Teresa Kutala Firmino’s exhibition at the Nagel Draxler Gallery, a Johannesburg-based multimedia artist. The show is the outcome of a four-week residency in Angola, but also of a richly personal endeavour into Firmino’s memories of the women around her and the way they coped with love and men. In the wake of bell hooks’ philosophy, adopting the perspective of care as an analytical item for gender and power relations[2], the artist depicts the romantic fantasies that, in times of white/capitalist/patriarchal supremacy – still using hooks’ terms – disguise various subordinations, abuses and extraneous control over women’s bodies. In her collage-style images, the characters resemble African masks (possibly because of their static and surreptitious quality, eclipsing their true, shrouded emotions; possibly because they nod to traditional communion ceremonies), with stylised proportions and exaggerated features. Two canvases bear the Portuguese inscriptions ‘A vida precisa de mim acordada’ (Life needs me awake) and ‘A vida precisa de mim de pé’ (Life needs me on my feet) – in other words, life needs you at all costs and at all times. In this context, love is made an instrument of production and reproduction, and it does not grant freedom without demanding something in return. The contraceptive pill – which, as journalist Nkosazana Lalitha points out in the exhibition text, may appear as a white sphere, a recurring motif in the artist’s work – is an allegory of this paradox: while allowing birth control, it medicalises and restricts private life through high doses of hormones and ‘somatic fictions’ of femininity[3]. Who shoves these pills down our throats?

Who is dictating how we behave, how we dress – how we move? Photographer and video artist Rineke Dijkstra at Espace Louis Vuitton challenges us with this complex and fragile process of establishing identity and self-image. Between four portraits and four video channels, the rooms of the institution grow dark and take on new walls to build the atmosphere of The Krazy House, a former Liverpool nightclub. There, between 2008 and 2009, the artist met and captured the five young people we see dancing more or less freely in what is her first Munich solo show. In these films, which run throughout the duration of each song, hand-picked for each person – and especially nostalgic for visitors born in the 1990s, like me – teenagers with distinctly unique personalities dance, in their own way, for Dijkstra’s lens. Against a white background with no shadows, lit and centred so as not to give us any hints about the depth or size of the space they were in, the figures appear in front of us. All the details of adolescence are there – the embarrassment, the fiddling with rules, the rehearsed movements, the awkward discovering and staging of self -, right under our noses. Cut off from the festive atmosphere they would usually share with so many others, we felt as if we were learning about the unique expressions of Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip and Dee. All of a sudden, also conscious of our own choreography and acquired gestures, they too seem to be getting to know us. Is there anything more human than performance?

On a different level, humanising can even involve drawing attention to perpetrators’ identities, acknowledging the violence produced and reproduced in our surroundings by people who share daily life with us. This is denounced by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, who devised the exhibition The Condition of No for the temporary installations of the Villa Stuck Museum. In three rooms, and similar to Pussy Riot’s intervention project, her works convert the premises of that building into a tactile and immersive experience of censorship mechanisms. As different surveillance and control systems function by weakening and splintering the media fabric, Bruguera reclaims a sort of counter-omission, laying bare the vulgar anatomy of repression through posters with the faces, full names and doings of people who act against democracy in Cuba. #NoTeDaVergüenza?, she asks them directly. Is there anything more human than violence?

However, some would say that we become more human when, not quite so paradoxically, we become less human. For instance, when we are confronted with the harsh reality of being a pile of dirt and tiny organisms, and when we realise that worms can also play the saxophone. We can hear them in Pamela Rosenkranz and Jenna Sutela’s dirt, where the abstraction ‘Nature’ is reduced to dust. The widespread concept of ‘energy’, crumbled down to the shreds of an edible paper sheet. To grasp the exhibition at max goelitz gallery, in partnership with Sprüth Magers, one must activate the senses to touch with the eyes, see with the ears and hear with the tongue; in other words, one must create a new body. That’s also what Rebecca Horn has been doing since the 1960s. The German artist’s retrospective at Haus der Kunst – endowed with new force in the wake of her death on the second day of Various Others – brilliantly reveals her finely disturbing universe, a space-time that could be as original as it is futuristic, where the limits between the human form and technologies are stretched to the breaking point. Violins play themselves here. The presence and absence of life are as ordinary as a metal butterfly or a piano hanging from the ceiling. Horn’s prolific career brings us the power of fantasy and metamorphosis – a theme that also resurfaces in Heidi Bucher’s beautiful designs and skins at Jahn und Jahn Munich and in Arang Cho’s fictional cosmology at nouveaux deuxdeux. At ERES Projects, we become Anna Hulačová’s flowers, longing for the bees that aren’t coming. Amidst the shadows of an Anthropocene scenario of cumulative social, political, economic and ecological crises, exhibitions like these remind us that imagination – and, above all, an imagination with other beings and existences – is clearly an ethical commitment. Is there anything more?

Various Others 2024 was held between September 5 and 15, and many exhibitions will be running for months to come. Munich’s art calendar is continually updated and can be checked on the Filter online platform.

Umbigo travelled to Munich at the invitation of Various Others.

[1] Coccia, Emanuele. (2020). Reversing The New Global Monasticism. Available in <https://fallsemester.org/2020-1/2020/4/17/emanuele-coccia-escaping-the-global-monasticism>.
[2] Hooks, Bell. (2023). All About Love: New Visions. Orfeu Negro.
[3] Preciado, Paul B. (2018). Testo Junkie. Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. N-1 Edições.