Kunst & Kolen

Een tentoonstellingsproject van RuhrKunstMuseen op het eind van steenkoolwinning in Duitsland.

GÖTZ DIERGARTEN, SVEN DRÜHL, BOGIMIR ECKER, RUTH HALLENSLEBEN, GEREON KREBBER, BARBARA KÖHLER, ADOLF LAZI, RICHARD LONG, OLAF METZEL, ALBERT RENGER-PATZSCH, THOMAS STRUTH, CLAUDIA TERSTAPPEN, THOMAS VIRNICH, HANNES VOGEL, WALTER VOGEL, LUDWIG WINDSTOSSER

04.05.2018 – 16.09.2018

The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with texts in German.

Together with 17 other RuhrKunstMuseums, the Museum DKM organized an exhibition project in 2018 on the cultural aspects of the phase-out of coal mining.

In the group presentation The Black Side, artists who had long been associated with the Museum DKM devoted themselves to individual aspects of the living and working world of miners. The exhibition made it clear that the identity-creating effect of the underground work was not limited to the mere acquisition of bread: living and living conditions, faith and religion, even the language produced independent peculiarities. These characterized the very own region of the Ruhr area far beyond much of what we thought we knew about it: about the depth of the shafts, the amount of coal extracted, perhaps also about the working conditions of the miners. The work underground and life in the colliery settlements formed a common horizon of experience, which the partly newly created works have emphasized artistically.

Beyond pure facts and well-known clichés, the disparate photographic, and sculptural works, and spatial installations by the artists showed a culture that has been cultivated for decades with its own rules, customs, and values. The exhibited positions united the search for a pictorial and linguistic way to draw attention to these specific peculiarities, to highlight them as such and to keep them in the memory beyond the end of coal mining.