Skulptur Projekte Münster, the storied exhibition that takes place once every decade in the titular German town, has revealed some of the first details of its 2027 edition—the first staged without the leadership of its founder, the lauded curator Kasper König, who died in 2024.
Celebrated artists such as Oscar Murillo, Selma Selman, and Hew Locke will be among the participants in next year’s edition of the show, which situates commissions around Münster. Also taking part this time around are Iza Tarasewicz and Róza El-Hassan. These five artists represent a sixth of the planned 30 participants, the rest of which will be named later on.
The sixth iteration is curated this time by the collective What, How & for Whom / WHW, which is composed of Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović. The exhibition will take up themes of marginalization and togetherness.
“We are interested in exploring how open and accessible the city [of Münster] is to different people and perspectives. We want to shed light on the many ‘cities within the city’, as well as on questions of participation, inclusion, exclusion, and community,” WHW said in a statement. “Our conversations with the artists have been inspired by the idea of shared narrations or objects: while each perspective is rooted in the specific, there are connections between many elsewheres and Münster.”
Since König founded it in 1977, the decennial has brought large-scale sculptural commissions beyond the confines of mainstream institutions, in the process making Münster, which has a population of around 300,000, a destination for public art. The city regularly buys a few contributions from each edition and renders them permanent, which is why Münster is now host to beloved works by Thomas Schütte, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, and more.
König’s boundary-pushing taste made Skulptur Projekte Münster a destination for people visiting Documenta, which is held once every five years in the nearby city of Kassel. In 2027, Documenta and Skulptur Projekte Münster once again coincide, ensuring that the latter will likely be heavily attended as well.
Those in town for the latter show can see such works as Murillo’s, which will include what a release described as “communal cooking and collective sharing.” Held at the former Officer’s Casino, Murillo’s commission is being done in collaboration with local crop producers.
Meanwhile, Locke is creating an installation about colonialism at the Haus der Niederlande at the Krameramtshaus, the site where the Netherlands and Spain inked an agreement that ended the Eight Years’ War in 1648, while Selman will contend with globalization through an installation dealing with scrap that will be shown at the former Hörster Friedhof.
El-Hassan will develop a work about migrations that will be shown in two discrete locations—
the Botanical Garden and the district of Berg Fidel—and Tarasewicz will create a work for a former farm that takes up the passage of the seasons.
The LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur is serving as the organizer of the show, which kicks off on June 12, 2027.
