Tranformation — Panta rhei

June 1 - July 7, 2024
Opening on Friday, May 31, at 7 p.m.

Everything flows. Everything is constantly evolving, be it languages, virus variants or us humans and our needs. Everything seems to be an eternal process of adaptation and optimization. The Künstlerhaus has also undergone various transformations. It was built in 1924 as a washhouse and the walled-up entrance to the Westfalia colliery can still be found in the basement today. The building was later part of the technical college and has housed art and studios for 41 years.

This conversion or misappropriation can also be found in art, where materials and objects are constantly being transformed (such as discarded cell phones), or transformation processes become the artists' subject of observation (such as climate change). What shapes us humans in a lifetime and what different lives fill space and time? You can't prevent change from happening.

Artists
Irene Pérez Hernández
Bernd Herzogenrath's (c)ovid's metamorphoses
Hanna Melnykova & Vera Vorneweg
SpaceTimePirates
Tanja Roolfs
Zbig Rybczynski
Anna Katharina Scheidegger
Yasin Wörheide

Curator
Achim Zepezauer (Ach Kuhzunft)

100 years of Waschkaue
"Transformation" is the last of three anniversary exhibitions celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Künstlerhaus Dortmund. The building was constructed in 1924 as a washhouse and operations building for Schacht Westfalia and was last used by the University of Applied Sciences for Design. Students from this school occupied the building and fought for its current status, self-administration. In 1987, the Künstlerhaus was renovated and converted with funds from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the city of Dortmund and Sparkasse Dortmund.

But what was it like underground back then? How did a washhouse become an artists' house? We will be exploring these and other questions in our anniversary talk on June 14 at 6 pm. We will be joined by Antje Hassinger (visual artist, founding member of Künstlerhaus Dortmund), Dr. Ingo Wuttke (historian from the Ruhr Museum in Essen) and Norbert Grondorf (former miner).