Galleries from around the world descend on Munich for Various Others

For four weeks this autumn, galleries, artist-run spaces, and institutions across Munich will welcome 19 partners from around the globe to exhibit on their walls for the fifth year of the festival Various Others. The jointly mounted presentations, with collaborators from cities spanning Mexico City to Tbilisi, showcase the rich variety and depth of global contemporary art. Here are six highlights of this year’s eclectic program.

Anna Ehrenstein and Andrew Gilbert
KOW (Berlin) hosted by Sperling
September 10 – October 15, 2022

Two German galleries come together here to mount a two-person exhibition highlighting artists whose distinct aesthetics share a common concern for post-colonial configurations of power. In a series of works made under the collective title The Albanian Conference: Home Is Where The Hatred Is (2021), Anna Ehrenstein details the two-decade legacy of the Afro-Asian Writers Conference held in Albania (where the German-born artist’s parents hail from): video screens are scattered through the exhibition space, protruding from pieces of workout equipment. Textile plinths descend from the ceiling, while a spray-painted maxim, ‘HOME IS WHERE THE HATRED IS’, graffiti’d onto the white wall, queries the conference’s legacy in the context of a (nominally) post-colonial and post-digital world. The Edinburgh-born Andrew Gilbert, too, satirically addresses the ramifications of imperialism, as in his painting Kabul Democracy Burger! 2022! (2022), where the titular fast food is given protruding, bloody limbs – and an American flag sprouting from the top of its sesame-seed-encrusted bun.

Emmanuel Awuni, Won Cha, and Ndayé Kouagou
LC Queisser (Tbilisi) and Sundy (London) hosted by Nir Altman
September 10 – October 30, 2022

Block-lettered slogans populate the work of the Paris-based artist Ndayé Kouagou, who retools the visual language of newspapers or retro ads to stage questions about place and belonging – in this case: WHEN AND WHERE TO FEEL COMFORTABLE? Works also in the show by Philadelphia-based artist Won Cha and London-based Emmanuel Awuni raise similar lines of inquiry, albeit in strikingly different forms. Cha draws on madangguk, a South Korean experimental theater tradition that came to life in the 1960s and is steeped in activist currents, one being a firm opposition to US-American occupation. In his installation then wear, does our mind go? Tbilisi (2021), personal, familial, political, and archival threads intertwine. Meanwhile, Awuni crafts sculptures, paintings, and installations informed by the non-hierarchical modes of sonic traditions like hip hop, Pidgin English, and Patois.

Trisha Baga, ‘There’s No “I” in Trisha’
Société (Berlin) hosted by beacon
September 9 – October 15, 2022

The American artist Trisha Baga started There’s No “I” in Trisha (2005–2007/2020) – a video work taking the form of a TV show, of which she is the writer, director, and star – when she was still a 19-year-old art student. The spoof sitcom unpacks gendered stereotypes, probing and parodying the tropes of the domestic space in which it, like many television programs of its ilk, is set. For this presentation at beacon, the white cube itself is refashioned as a living room piled with patchwork quilts and VHS tapes, welcoming viewers into a space that itself resembles a sitcom’s mise-en-scène. In this monument to mass-broadcast artifice, Baga’s drama, drawn from life, unfolds onscreen.

Gabriel Rico, ‘when there were more donkeys than icosahedrons’
OMR (Mexico City) hosted by max goelitz
September 10 – October 20, 2022

Gabriel Rico’s solo show features sculptures and wall objects that serve as a coda to the Mexican artist’s process-driven practice, where commonplace materials are gathered in logical formations. Roughly hewn natural materials intermingle with the retro-futurist flavor of neons, all brought into harmony by human-executed gestures that recall the logic of computation. In Because Nothing is More Pleasant to the Eye Than Green Grass Kept Finely Short (99cm) (2022), for instance, a series of knives, each highly different from the others, is arranged in a circle, the points of their blades enveloping a charged field of negative space. Cantidades salvajes (Afección) (2021) similarly gestures toward the mathematical underpinnings of Rico’s work, its neon tubes twisted into an algebraic equation, its variables rendered as glowing blue bones. Playful on the surface, these works quietly raise questions about the practice and impact of humans’ forced ordering of the natural world.

Kenneth Anger and Hans-Jörg Mayer
Sprüth Magers hosted by Galerie Christine Mayer
September 10 – October 15, 2022

Two legends of 20th-century experimentation across media – filmmaker Kenneth Anger (born 1927) and the painter Hans-Jörg Mayer (born 1955) – come together in this exhibition, united by lore around a number of bizarre coincidences that connect their otherwise disparate work (for one: Mayer’s zodiac sign, Scorpio, figures into the title of Anger’s most famous film, Scorpio Rising). Departing, as occult connections often do, from a shared affection from Aleister Crowley, Anger and Mayer meditate on obsessions with death across each of their oeuvres, as exemplified in this show. This is not done without hope, though: the presence of Kali, Hindu goddess of creative destruction, in the German painter’s work points equally toward rebirth and renewal.

Kikuo Saito
September 9 – November 5, 2022
James Fuentes Gallery (New York City) hosted by Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle

Munich’s Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle and New York City’s James Fuentes present a solo show of the often-overlooked Japanese abstract painter Kikuo Saito (1939–2016). The Tokyo-born artist started painting at age 17, moving to New York a decade later to embark on an adventure that would bring him into contact with the LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club and land him assistantships with the likes of Helen Frankenthaler and Larry Poons. Saito developed a style of painting bearing spectral alphabetical motifs, its rich palette linked to the Lyrical Abstraction and Color Field movements, all brought together in dialogue with the experimental theater productions that he also frequently staged. This exhibition presents works from the artist’s estate, including the letter-laden and rust-colored painting Spanish Pink (2003), solidifying the legacy of an under-appreciated talent and introducing his work to new audiences.

Adina Glickstein is a writer and editor living in Berlin.

Various Others 2022 runs from September 8 – October 9, 2022.