The Best Shows to See Alongside Art Cologne

Ursula Burghardt and Benjamin Patterson | Museum Ludwig, Cologne |12 October – 9 February 2025

When Art Cologne first launched in 1967, the city was a vibrant hub for fluxus – an interdisciplinary art movement, whose members staged spontaneous performances and intertwined experimental music and literature into their practices. Two decades after World War II, Cologne was an amalgam of ruins and reconstructed modernist buildings, avant-garde ideas and the haunting remnants of Nazi ideology. It was also here that, in 1960, two lesser-known fluxus artists, Ursula Burghardt and Benjamin Patterson, met in the studio of Mary Bauermeister. While Patterson is arguably best known for his musical compositions, this expansive survey at Museum Ludwig focuses on his work from the 1980s onwards, which consists of assemblage and collage as well as lecture-performances. Burghardt found her trademark material in aluminium, which she used to construct everyday objects, such as boots or furniture. This survey looks into their respective practices within and outside of fluxus, providing an enlightening new perspective on an otherwise familiar chapter of art history.

Marcel Odenbach | Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne | 7 November – 25 January 2025

For his third exhibition in his hometown with Galerie Gisela Capitain, Marcel Odenbach has produced a new video work alongside several collages. The artist’s practice is defined by his enormous material archive: by referencing newspaper articles, found photographs, family documents, snippets of television shows and self-filmed footage, Odenbach juxtaposes historical events with personal memories. For example, the large-scale collage wir lassen es krachen (We Let It Rip, 2024) references a snapshot of firework detritus that Odenbach took on New Year’s Eve 2022–23 in Berlin. The night was marked by violent riots across the city, followed by hasty judgements from politicians and the media regarding the perpetrators and their social and ethnic backgrounds. Upon closer inspection, the papered fragments reveal encyclopaedic snapshots of animals collaged between figures from the Berlin rap scene, who, similarly to the rioters, often face social prejudice.

Enya Burger | Philipp von Rosen Galerie, Cologne | 7 November – 21 December

Enya Burger, a recent graduate from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf who studied under Gregor Schneider, marks her artistic debut with her first solo exhibition at Philipp von Rosen Galerie. Burger uses immersive video and mixed-media installations to expose structures of power, oppression and gender stereotypes from the perspective of a female, queer gaze. Whilst her solo booth in the New Positions section at Art Cologne interrogates the power hierarchies in science, this exhibition is built around her video installation The World as a Phantom (2023–24), which deals with the influence of AI on societal values and norms. Here, Burger uses documentary material and AI-generated content to look at the people responsible for technological progress and digitalization (surprise: they are predominantly male) and addresses the potentially disastrous impact of their work, imagining a dystopian reality in which AI has gained power over humans.

Ani Schulze | Moltkerei Werkstatt, Cologne | 27 October – 7 December

Upon entering the lofty space of Moltkerei Werkstatt, located in a courtyard within the city’s Belgian Quarter, visitors are immediately immersed in Ani Schulze’s whimsical world. Blue café chairs are arranged in front of two video screens that hang on green wooden walls made from crates used to transport artworks. Sculptures of little puppets populate the gallery furniture as well as the films on display. The first episode of Schulze’s video series ‘The Convent of Pleasure’ (2023–ongoing) plays on one of the monitors: we follow a phantasmagorical community of people whose faces have been covered by painted masks as they move through the city and try to invade the titular convent. In Episode 7: At One Go, premiering here, the group has been transported into a setting where cameras supervise their every move, until one person is excommunicated from the convent. Reflecting on global dynamics of exclusion and belonging, this depiction is simultaneously humorous and brutal.

Katharina Sieverding | Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf | 1 November – 23 March 2025

While Katharina Sieverding initially took up photography as a means to document the turbulent years at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the class of Joseph Beuys, where she started her artistic career in the late 1960s, she soon became known for her large-scale colour prints, long before the (predominantly male) Düsseldorf School of Photography began to dominate the scene. Perhaps most famous for the serial close-ups of her face, Sieverding was and remains a political artist, openly tackling issues around national identity, anti-democratic movements, power dynamics and the destruction of the earth by humans. Her work Deutschland wird Deutscher (Germany Becomes German, 1992) seems more appropriate now than ever, with an extreme-right party winning elections in Germany and growing global populism. In the early 1990s, following the country’s reunification and the founding of the EU, Sieverding’s image was distributed on more than 500 billboards across Berlin – championing civil responsibility at a time when nationalist thinking was once again on the rise. This vast retrospective at K21 brings together iconic works from the last 60 years of the artist’s practice, presenting her extensive archive to the public for the first time.

Monica Majoli | Kunstverein Düsseldorf | 12 October – 26 January 2025

At Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Los Angeles-based artist Monica Majoli’s solo show offers an original approach to photography. Her works, conceived in series, each defined by its own unique conceptual technique, draw on found photographs or pictures taken by the artist. Whether it’s the sombre and intimate chiaroscuro images of the artist’s former lovers (‘Black Mirror’, 2009–12) or the delicate pastel watercolour and woodcut portraits of naked gay men in the series ‘Blueboys’ (2015–19) and ‘Olympus’ (2024), based on photographs taken from queer erotic magazines of the 1970s and ’80s, the works are characterized by tenderness and corporeality, capturing moments of desire and pleasure as well as melancholy. ‘Olympus’, the artist’s most recent body of work, is a poignant memorial to the victims of the AIDS epidemic. With the scenography and lighting carefully amplifying the mood of each series, the show is a truly touching experience.

_{Main image: ‘Fluxus and beyond: Ursula Burghardt, Benjamin Patterson’, 2024, installation view. Courtesy: © The Estate of Benjamin Patterson; photograph: Rheinisches Bildarchiv/Marc Weber}