Opening: 27 November 2026, 7pm
With works by Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Dara Birnbaum, Alexander Kluge, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ulrike Rosenbach, Wolf Vostell and Andy Warhol.
Since its founding in 1991, the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst has defined itself as “a different kind of museum” – a forum for exploring art in dialogue with the public. The exhibition public/public draws on the museum’s own history and on Aachen collectors Irene and Peter Ludwig’s commitment to collecting for the public. Through the optic of transatlantic relations since the 1960s, it explores the changing relationship between art and the public sphere. How do artists, art and art institutions address the public? Where do debate and dialogue take place?
Since the 1960s, social upheavals have increasingly dissolved artistic boundaries and led to a diversification of forms of expression and action, including happenings, performance, video and sound art. These upheavals have also brought a clear shift in art’s relationship with audiences, public space and the media, with art increasingly taking place outside institutional spaces. Viewers become participants and co-producers. Taking these shifts as its starting point, public/public explores the public sphere as a changing arena for action and conflict. The exhibition is designed to evolve across four rooms until 2028.
The public sphere is made up of a wide range of actors: individuals, media, networks and institutions express themselves within and through distinct sub-spheres of the public audience. Each of these sub-spheres develops its own forms of identification and participation, while also drawing lines in the sand. Seen in this light, the public sphere can be understood as a reflection of the structural processes of inclusion and exclusion at work within liberal democracies. The exhibition therefore sheds light on questions of visibility and opportunities for participation, as well as on conflicts, the formation of counterpublics and forms of subversion.
public/public opens alongside Iván Argote’s solo exhibition Hier Zusammen. Both explore what it means to be a forum and mark the start of the Ludwig Forum’s programme under its new director.
Credits: Visitors of Festival der Neuen Kunst am 20. Juli 1964 in the Audimax of TH Aachen, © Peter Thomann 1964/2011