Introduction

From November 30, 2024 to February 23, 2025, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld is presenting the exhibition “Dreams of an Owl, Who the Bær and the Wounded Planet”, which reorganizes the Kunsthalle’s collection and is supplemented by an intervention by the British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara.

When do owls dream? What do animals, which in cultural history often stand for foresight and wisdom, dream of? Perhaps the artist Hans (Jean) Arp was hoping for more insight when he renamed his 1937/38 sculpture “Owl” “Owl Dream” in 1957? With his view that artistic and natural processes are of equal value and that man and his actions are always in relation to nature and by no means superior to it, Hans Arp anticipated central aspects of our thinking today.

For the first time in human history, our actions are becoming visible in the planetary system. In view of the climate crisis, a change of perspective is necessary in all areas of life, from the natural sciences, art and culture to politics and everyday life. What role can a museum play in this? Our collections are our visual memory: which images and which new constellations help us to change our thinking and our ideas, our relationship to the world?

Based on Arp’s “Owl Dream” as a key work, the exhibition raises the question of which images inspire or encourage us to change our perspective. A total of 200 works by over 150 international artists will be on display, all of which revolve around the relationship between man and nature. In addition to some classics from the collection, including works by Max Beckmann, Gerhard Richter, Auguste Rodin, Agnes Martin and others, it is also about discovering artists with a regional connection such as Simone Nieweg, Theo Ortmann and Benita Koch-Otte. Donations and acquisitions from recent years will also be on display (including works by Olaf Nicolai, Rita McBride and Katinka Bock). Individual loans (Hans (Jean) Arp, Julia Scher, Charline von Heyl) complement the exhibition. A special exhibition architecture was developed to create a dense and rich visual narrative in the rooms.

Which works or themes from the Kunsthalle Bielefeld collection do we see with different eyes against the backdrop of the climate crisis, planetary thinking – or in short: in the age of man, the “Anthropocene”? And what consequences do we draw from this for our museum work? These questions will not only be examined on an institutional level and with a new perspective on the museum’s own collection, but will also be supplemented by a contemporary artistic voice that gives form to central questions of our reality of life with an intervention by the British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara.