Since 2002, when the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary Arts moved from the Haus der Kunst to the Pinakothek der Moderne, the former has been in something of a state of flux. By no longer having a permanent collection, Haus der Kunst was not exactly a museum in the traditional sense. And though it has housed many exhibitions since, the variation of these — from Tutankhamen to Gilbert and George — made the institution feel lacking in direction, to say the least. If you were going to Prinzregentenstrasse 1, it’s fair to say that it was at night, to the infamous P1 night club in the museum’s basement.
So, last year Haus der Kunst began working on a makeover, hiring Base Design to completely overhaul the museum's visual identity and putting forth a new and very appropriate mantra for the institution: “Stretch Your View.” They also appointed celebrated curator Okwui Enwezor to direct the institution along its new path.
On Thursday, the one-year anniversary of his appointment, Enwezor announced the outline of how that program will look. Central to the new diection is a plan to transform the museum's lack of a permanent collection into a strategic asset — turning Haus der Kunst, in some abstract sense, into a storehouse of collective knowledge. As such, he is vastly expanding the institution's educational programs as well as orienting its resources towards scholarly and curatorial research, using these bases as the backpressure to push exhibitions forward rather than a massive collection of works themselves.
As such, Enwesor has proposed that the museum will be a “work in progress” over the next years, setting several key goals for its critical approach. Perhaps most notable of these is an explicit return to questioning Haus der Kunt’s historical positioning. After all, the museum was initially constructed as a nationalist monument to German culture by the Nazi regime on the eve of World War II, a still-taboo subject of conversation across much of the country, yet one, as Enwezor has suggested, that can not be simply swept under the rug by a shiny new Web site and branding team. To this end, Haus der Kunst will open “75/20” — referring to the 75 anniversary of the museum’s founding and 20th anniversary of its reinstatement in 1993 — an exhibition both celebrating and criticizing the institution’s history, especially focused on the troubled period from 1933-1955.
Haus der Kunst will also aim to turn its focus outward, examining the world from an artistic, cultural, and political standpoint. In certain ways, this new trajectory places Haus der Kunst in a much more cosmopolitan field, more similar to Berlin institutions than its peers in Munich — save perhaps the Pinakothek der Moderne — which can be fairly provincial in their outlook.