New year's reception⎟RoadMap Museion?

BY PERSONAL INVITATION ONLY

We are celebrating the 10th anniversary of MUNICH SPEECH® with my first guest in 2014, Bart van der Heide, then director of the Kunstverein München and now director of the Museion in Bolzano. Twelve successful years with guests such as Andrea Lissoni (artistic director of Haus der Kunst), Serge Dorny (director of the Bavarian State Opera), and Prof. Monika Schnitzer (chair of the German Council of Economic Experts) and the founding of the Behncke Gallery are now behind me. Bart van der Heide took over as director in June 2020 and will talk about his vision for the Museion in Bolzano.

Bart van der Heide is an internationally renowned art historian and exhibition curator. Before taking up his post in Bolzano, he was chief curator of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 2015 to 2019, where he was responsible for the museum's wide range of exhibitions, collection presentations, and accompanying events. From 2010 to 2015, Bart van der Heide led the Kunstverein München, which grew considerably under his direction.

Van der Heide has set himself ambitious goals with his new “RoadMap 2023” and remains true to his own credo that a museum should be “more than the sum of its exhibitions.” The list of desired collaborations is long, and the museum is also sticking to the methodology of an autonomously operating and event-creating Museion Art Club. Bart says: "My hope lies in the museum, in a general sense: I have hope for the role of the museum in society, for the humanities. We should not evaluate everything empirically, measurably, and technically. We are human beings and should concern ourselves with what makes us human. Not with what competes with us in technology, such as artificial intelligence. We are human beings, we have moments when we are productive, but also moments when we are not, when we are vulnerable. These are important values with which we should identify more strongly. We are not machines. That is why I have great hope in the system of public museums."

We are facing an enormous shift in values, and I see the artists in the current exhibition as seismographs of our time. "Mysterious Travels” deals with questions of identity (which values should we identify with?) or the spiritual journey between cultures, featuring Charmaine Poh (Singapore/Berlin), Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year” 2025 and Villa Romana Prize 2026 (see Silke Hohmann https://www.monopol-magazin.de...).

Mysterious Travels
15\. November 2025 - 31. Januar 2026
Jaemin Lee
Youngjun Lee
Charmaine Poh
Kun Su
Wang Zhibo

In the context of the exhibition, I will talk to Bart about the thematic complexes and curatorial exhibition concepts that make his museum attractive and which artistic positions are leading figures for him.