Kunstmuseum Bochum

A museum for contemporary art represents a “social institution” in an ambiguous way. Among other things, it is the social institution that deals with the current forms of communication in art and everyday life, examines them and questions them.

The Kunstmuseum Bochum was founded as a municipal art gallery for art after 1945 in 1960. Fifteen years after the end of World War II, the declared goal was to found the first museum for modern art in Germany. In the words of the art critic Schulze Vellinghausen, they wanted to create an “optical force field in the center of the city” - a claim that we also make for our work. In the meantime, our institute collects, preserves and presents international art from 1900 to the present day. The art museum Bochum is located in the middle of the dense museum landscape of the Ruhr area and in direct proximity to the Rhenish art metropolises Düsseldorf and Cologne. The program takes account of this cultural-geographical location on the one hand and nationwide art tourism on the other.

It is part of our self-image as a municipal museum to find a balance between local needs and supraregional demands. It is important to mobilize the local artistic and cultural-political energies for work that promotes identification and at the same time to be effective nationally and internationally. As a mediator between art and viewer, we observe that in times of technical floods of images and virtual worlds, the feeling for the unique, irretrievable, the authentic is lost and at the same time there is “visual illiteracy”. Against this background, we see our political mission in leading to emancipated, i.e. self-determined seeing, both in art and in everyday life.

Seeking unconventional means to establish contact, the Kunstmuseum Bochum has an almost conservative self-image: As a municipal institute, we work on the political mandate of the city's citizens. In contrast to a private museum, where the sponsor or donor can set any priorities, where personal preferences or commercial success set standards, a communal institution must inform and communicate according to "democratic principles" on the one hand, and every system, whether aesthetic, philosophical or political, on the other. to question - a duty that we take seriously. In concrete terms, this means taking responsibility for maintaining the freedom of art and at the same time guiding the citizen towards a visual, or better: aesthetic, maturity. The consequence of this is that in addition to promoting, initiating and researching art, its communication has a particularly high priority.

A museum for contemporary art represents a “social institution” in an ambiguous way. Among other things, it is the social institution that deals with the current forms of communication in art and everyday life, examines and questions them. On the one hand, representing the city with its legal and political tasks and structures, a city museum for contemporary art must guarantee the existentially necessary freedom to develop. It must not wither into a performance-oriented educational institution or a commercially oriented leisure facility if it is to make the emancipatory power of art tangible.

We claim to be a special place that is unlike other places, contradicts them, eludes them. To put it more pointedly, it is a matter of locating the museum in contradiction to society, not adapting it, but rather provocatively isolating it. Instead of exhausting the meaning of a contemporary museum in “topicality”, it is about “alterity” and “otherness”. However, this programmatic provocation does not work without identification - it also requires localization - a challenge that we face!