OUT OF THE BOX – Public Art München

CH Rather than using public art to illustrate predefined narratives, your curatorial approach creates the conditions for artistic experiences, allowing meaning to emerge through the encounter itself. What does this understanding of curating mean to you, and how does it shape the way you work with artists?

DB & LvG For us, curating does not mean illustrating a theme, but building a framework in which something can happen that we couldn’t have predicted. We don’t prescribe themes — we create conditions: time, place, resources, backing. Meaning emerges in the concrete encounter between the work, the site, and the people who happen to be there. In public space, this takes on a particular edge: our audience does not consciously choose us. Whoever encounters a work brings along their own context, their own history with any given place. To supply an interpretation as well would simply be presumptuous. All we can do is make sure the encounter becomes properly possible in the first place — and that it stays open. For our work with the artists, this means that open processes are explicitly welcome. In very practical terms: in public space, something always changes. Permits, regulatory conditions, ownership questions, residents, construction sites, politics, weather. No project is realised the way it was planned and that is the basis we work from. A large part of curatorial work consists of precisely this: accepting this open process and accommodating it — negotiating, stretching deadlines, absorbing pressure, keeping decisions movable for as long as possible. Perhaps our central task, both internally as much as externally, is creating and defending openness. It is only if a work is allowed to respond to its site until the very end can something genuinely emerge in the encounter, instead of merely being delivered on.

CH As you just outlined, bringing a public artwork to life requires much more than a compelling artistic idea. It also involves technical planning, local production, permissions, and close collaboration with many different partners. Could you walk us through the journey from an initial concept to a realized commission?

DB & LvG The course of a project in public space is indeed hard to describe in general terms, since every project brings its own challenges. Accumulated experience carries you a certain distance, but it does not replace the work of opening up each site anew. What usually takes the most time for the artists are the permit procedures and securing a site. For their project “Bridge Sprout”, Atelier Bow-Wow deliberately understood the dialogue with the authorities as part of the artistic process. At the outset of their concept there was a path rather than a concrete design. This shows how differently art in public space operates compared to art in institutional spaces.

CH Public Art München brings together artists, advisory boards, students, institutions, and city departments throughout the development of a project. How do these different perspectives strengthen the curatorial process and not impede on artistic freedom?

DB & LvG The selection processes alone are multi-stage and multi-voiced: the international projects, which are chosen in an invited competition, are decided on by a programme advisory board composed of art experts and representatives of the city council. This procedure reflects both the current art scene and urban society at large. Such a board thus stands for a democratic aspiration — with everything that a process of this kind necessarily involves in the way of deliberation and compromise. Since we are not a classical art institution in that sense, but rather have the city as our space, we are also continually looking for collaborations within the city and with institutions (for instance with Haus der Kunst (with Karimah Ashadu) or with the Academy of Fine Arts Munich (with Alexandra Pirici)). This generates additional synergies and circulations of audiences, as well as the opportunity to deepen discursive formats.

CH Cities often appear unified from the outside, yet they are made up of many overlapping realities, histories, and communities. How can public art make this complexity visible without simplifying or explaining it?

DB & LvG Since the projects are all site-specific and stem from these civic intricacies, before developing a concept the artists usually undertake extensive research and visit the site. What emerges from this feels less like an overview and more like a relationship. We don’t ask artists to represent “the city” — that would simply be another simplification — we ask them for their individual, unique perspective on the environment we all share. Perhaps this is also where the particular potential of art in public space lies: in opening up new points of view. For example, until December 2026, the artist duo Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader are showing their piece ABC (Always Be Communicating), a series of abstract animations on the cultural development of American Sign Language on eleven monitors housed in the historic display cases of the Public Art München Passage at Marienplatz. What becomes visible in the process is something many people are not aware of: there is no universal sign language; sign languages are self-contained, grammatically complex languages that have developed over time. Almost in passing, the work shifts the focus to those who are taken for granted in public spaces—and whose language is visible there.

CH Exactly as in situations like this, encountering an artwork unexpectedly while walking through the city can interrupt familiar routines and ways of thinking. Do you see this moment of disruption as one of the most important qualities of public art?

DB & LvG Yes, creating moments of friction is for us one of the central qualities of art in public space. At the moment of interruption, the ‘familiar’ briefly reveals itself as something constructed: as something that was decided and could just as well be otherwise. These interruptions can be small, we usually work with nuanced shifts and disclosures, which can be all the more effective. That being said, it’s important not to overestimate the role art plays in public space — it cannot be expected to transform a city entirely or resolve all its conflicts. That isn’t our intention.

CH And many of these ‘small’ shifts are also temporary — what possibilities or strengths does temporality offer that a lasting monument or permanent installation often cannot?

DB & LvG Artistic practice, and cultures of remembrance in particular (monument cultures among them), are in constant motion — they are a process of negotiation, not a permanent condition. The debates of recent years show how hard it is to unsettle something once it has been fixed in place. Temporary projects don’t have to carry that burden. They can set an impulse without locking it down, and they can repeat it, shift it, revise it. This becomes especially tangible in this year’s project NACH:LEBEN by the artist Cana Bilir-Meier, in collaboration with Chana Boekle and Silvia Troian. Their installation consists of sculptures in the form of panels bearing symbols created specifically for the work, developed together with people affected by and survivors of far-right and racist violence in Munich — symbols that articulate their perspectives, their remembering, their resilience, their wishes, and also their struggles and their demands. Here, remembrance remains bound to (re)negotiation instead of being delegated to a site. What becomes apparent is how such processes have to be activated and sustained anew, again and again. This stands, above all, for performative formats: they exist only in their enactment, they need people to carry them, and they are performed and received differently every time. That often brings them closer to the matter at hand than an object claiming to have settled it once and for all. There is also this: temporality lowers the stakes. Many things can be only tried out at all because they disappear again — forms, sites or conflicts that would never survive a permanent placement. That allows for risk. What remains is rarely the object, anyway. It is the experiences, the images, the conversations a work has set in motion. This form of remaining, these traces, interest us more than durability in the material sense.

CH Temporality often negotiates with sustainability, which has become an integral part of Public Art München, influencing production, material choices, logistics, and long-term planning. How has this changed your conversations with artists, and has it also begun to shape the artistic concepts themselves?

DB & LvG We understand sustainability in material terms, as resource-conscious and — where possible — local production. But sustainability also touches on the question of artists’ working conditions. This year we placed an even stronger emphasis on performative projects, in which funds flow less into materials than into the artistic work itself. These included, for instance, a collaboration with the performance class at the Academy of Fine Arts, but also formats such as storytelling performances on the history of dance in Munich — proceeding from migrant communities, alternative scenes, clubs, parks, basements and sites, some of which no longer exist today (by Sandra Chatterjee); bicycle excursions tracing local water connections (by Lea Geerkens); sound and film excursions on the city as a real-time sound system, with the voices of its inhabitants (by Bülent Kullukcu & Anton Kaun); city excursions on queer history (by Francesco Giordano & Anian Halder); a project on the city as a community of organisms forming an ecosystem (Judith Egger and the “United Holobiontic Protection Alliance” (UHPA)); and excursions to the banks of the Isar on human–nature relations (by Stefanie Zoche & Claus Biegert). The artist Christiane Huber, in turn, staged a project at Munich’s Michaelibad: the three-part work engages with the past, present and possible future of public outdoor pools as places of democratic negotiation and diversity.

CH That’s an expansive list. In terms of performance or installation, for many artists, working in public space feels difficult to access. From your perspective, what distinguishes a proposal that has real potential, and what advice would you give to artists who hope to realize their first public commission?

DB & LvG Concepts with potential establish a genuine relationship with the site — they could not be placed everywhere. At the same time, they stem from a sincere interest of the artists themselves. They are also flexible: what convinces us is rarely a fully pre-planned concept, but rather one that maintains a clear stance while still allowing space for transformation throughout the process. Our advice is to find accomplices! People from the local context who know the environment — "specialists of everyday life.” Working in public space is always a collective process, and the quality of these relationships often influences the success of a project far more than the original idea itself. Another thing is that it’s essential not to get stuck on the first rejection. Often, a "not possible" actually means "not necessarily like that". If a person rejects an idea, it is most often the signal that their story wants to be heard, too. In many cases there is an alternative approach that holds new potential.

CH Looking ahead, how do you see the role of public art evolving as cities respond to social transformation, environmental challenges, and new forms of public life? What kinds of artistic practices do you hope to see more of in the years to come?

DB & LvG What art in public space can and cannot achieve is currently being renegotiated: much of it comes down to protecting open, unrestricted spaces. The more diverse and experimental the programs are, the greater the potential. It is about creating and preserving places for processes of negotiation and having the courage to carry out projects whose outcome cannot be fully anticipated.