Skulptur Projekte Münster 2027 Adds 13 Commissions

Skulptur Projekte Münster has announced 13 additional commissions for its sixth edition, opening in June 2027. The list runs from Kapwani Kiwanga and Ali Cherri to Nolan Oswald Dennis and Kosen Ohtsubo. That brings the tally to 18 named artists for what will be the decennial public art exhibition's 50th anniversary — the first edition since cofounder Kasper König died in 2024.

Artistic direction sits with the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom / WHW: Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović. Their brief is unusually historical. At the exhibition's core sits the Peace of Westphalia, the 1648 treaty that ended the Thirty Years' War and was partly negotiated in Münster, giving the city its motto of "peace through dialogue." The curators plan to set that legacy against what a release calls "Münster's involvement in Europe's long history of violent combat" and "a world shaped by wars and smouldering conflicts."

What are the artists actually making?

The named commissions come with specifics:

• Ali Cherri will build several large-scale sculptures for the garden of the Officers' Casino, part of the Gremmendorf military barracks — built by the Nazis, used by the British military until 2012.
• Kapwani Kiwanga turns to the "ambiguous force of water," from nourishment to destruction, including the 1660 flooding of Münster by the Prince Bishop.
• Nolan Oswald Dennis will map the southern Münster neighborhood of Berg Fidel "onto the cosmos and vice versa, constructing an observatory as a hyper-local calendric device," per a release.
• Kosen Ohtsubo, an ikebana (Japanese flower-arranging) practitioner since the 1960s, will transform local apple trees felled once they stop bearing fruit into a large-scale installation in the city center.

What do the curators want from public art?

WHW's statement is the meatiest thing in the announcement. "Informed by the history of Münster as 'City of Westphalian Peace,' the artists of Skulptur Projekte 2027 are developing their proposals in awareness of the violence of the present, considering the political decisions, historical global relations, and economic systems that have shaped it," the collective said. "Against the ruptures and losses of recent years, the exhibition asks not only what art can show, but what it can hold. In times when cancellations, censorship, and withdrawal have constrained cultural work, Skulptur Projekte seeks to make room for voices to be heard, for losses to be mourned, for consolation, and for alternatives to be proposed."

They also resist the spectacle economy of public art. "An artwork in the public space need not compete for visibility in an already overly saturated world; it can offer time to witness, to feel, and to stay with what cannot readily be resolved," WHW said. "At a moment when political and economic propositions struggle to make a positive future imaginable, the faint hope of Skulptur Projekte 2027 is that such encounters with art in public space might allow for perspectives to be felt and acknowledged that are often misrepresented or obscured, without forcing consensus where none exists."

"Faint hope" is a refreshingly modest pitch. Time will tell whether the works deliver it.

Who else is on the list?

The full roster, with asterisks marking previously announced commissions:

• Mercedes Azpilicueta
• Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann
• Ali Cherri
• Nolan Oswald Dennis
• Róza El-Hassan*
• Kapwani Kiwanga
• Natascha Sadr Haghighian
• Vlatka Horvat
• Iman Issa
• Anton Kats
• Hew Locke*
• Oscar Murillo*
• Myvillages
• Kosen Ohtsubo
• Khalil Rabah
• Ashfika Rahman
• Selma Selman*
• Iza Tarasewicz*

Come June 2027, Münster's parks, barracks gardens and city center will host the test: a treaty anniversary, a dead founder's legacy, and 18 artists asked to hold what art can hold.