Art without context? Annual Report of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation 2019 published
Press release from 06/04/2020
What was the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation up to in 2019? From "Mantegna and Bellini" to Alexander von Humboldt's 250th birthday and the ground-breaking ceremony for the new Nationalgalerie building at the Kulturforum to over four million museum visits. The recently published annual report provides information on the most important exhibitions, the most exciting construction progress, the most interesting research projects and the most successful activities in the areas of education and communication. It also includes an interview with the German and Namibian participants in the "Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures" project, which resulted in 23 objects from the Ethnological Museum returning to their place of origin in Namibia, as well as detailed figures on the foundation's budget and the number of visitors and users.
The focus topic of the issue is "Artists' lives": based on the most controversial exhibition of 2019, "Emil Nolde - A German Legend. The artist under National Socialism", the curator of the exhibition, Aya Soika, the director of Hamburger Bahnhof, Gabriele Knapstein, and the artist Norbert Bisky discuss the connections between art and context, author and work, reception and morality. For the photo series, Anna Szkoda travelled with her camera to various estates in the stacks and depots of all SPK institutions. The result is a photographic essay on the question of what remains of an artist's life.
In 2018, after sixty years, the SPK Annual Report replaced the time-honoured yearbook, which had recorded events at the foundation for eternity since 1958. Lean, up-to-date, discursive - this is how the new print event was launched. The current SPK Annual Report was once again designed by anschlaege.de, with editorial responsibility in the hands of Gesine Bahr and the Media and Communication Department of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.