Welcome to Biennale di Venezia / Perspectives for Cologne

The EUROPEAN KUNSTHALLE KOELN is presently one of the most exceptional projects in the context of contemporary art. With a successful benefit auction in 2004, the constitution of a European inaugural council, and the vocation of Nicolaus Schafhausen as founding director, the EUROPEAN KUNSTHALLE has already anchored itself in the cultural awareness at home and abroad. The Cologne association “Das Loch” is the initiator of the project, in which personalities of the art and cultural scene have gathered along the phenonema of cultural-political conditions concerning the demolition of the former Kunsthalle in Cologne in order to start a contemporary and future-oriented discourse about urban space and public culture.

The privately initiated proclamation of the EUROPEAN KUNSTHALLE KOELN is rule-breaking in communal politics. It instantly formulates and explores different ways of thinking and acting in a political context, and also of participation and societal responsibility. The resulting initial situation of the founding director is as paradox as it is unique; neither politically authorised nor bound to a concrete location, is he offered the rare opportunity of invention. Nicolaus Schafhausen holds Carte Blanche. His central job will be to develop and elaborate future oriented and lasting perspectives and structures for an art hall as a platform for contemporary art. The deeply changed conditions of political acting, economical and urban structures, and also cultural production are to be perceived as well as the opportunities of an extended European context for the constitution, the linking-up and the covering of the Kunsthalle are to be discovered and exploited.

The name of the model experiment, EUROPEAN KUNSTHALLE KOELN is programmatic to the extend that it postulates Europe itself to be an open project of participation and design. By negotiating its practices of self-constitution, production and conveyance of a communal-societal institution in a European context, the EUROPEAN KUNSTHALLE acts as a co-producer in the project of Europe. “It will be about the fact that such an important re-establishment is not to be developed from existing deficits, but from a broad vision, in which the potentials of culture in a societal future are manifested. Not the location-specific adaption of the model “Kunsthalle” is to be in the centre of consideration, but the development of a model which exceeds the core of art and therewith opens perspectives for an urban society.” (Schafhausen)

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STEP 1 Welcome to Biennale di Venezia
Piccolo Incontro with Nicolaus Schafhausen
10.06.2005, 17–19 h
Circolo Ricreativo Culturale “ 3 Augusto”, Rifondazione Comunista, Castello, Corte Nova

STEP 2 Perspectives for Cologne
Lecture by Nicolaus Schafhausen, founding director of EUROPEAN KUNSTHALLE KOELN
29.06.05, 19.30 h,
Cinema auditorium in Museum Ludwig Cologne