To open an unconference—a participant-driven meeting that deviates from conventional conference formats—with Alexander Kluge is to open a portal to the very architecture of Munich's history. Kluge, who lives just a stone's throw away from the city center, steps into the Bayerischer Hof not as a celebrity but as a chronicler of the unresolved. For decades, he has articulated the flickering role of media in the personal and the political, the banal and the profound, between systems in decline and moments of defiant utopianism.
Kluge’s keynote “Das Chamäleon Wirklichkeit und die Beharrlichkeit der Kunst” (May 8, 7:30 pm) will not simply address the persistence of art but will embody it, confronting the surreal setting of the Bayerischer Hof itself—a bastion of imperialist decadence turned this year into a stage for Munich’s particular scene of contemporary art. To set the tone with Kluge is to insist that the past is never past, that critique is the method of inhabiting this ruinous present, and that staying against the ruins is itself a radical act of endurance.
But who else is staying, and what exactly is it too soon to say, as the title of Various Others this year suggests?
To open a gallery weekend in a daring, experimental yet hyperbolic way underlines the notions of Bavaria’s capital as a city of fortresses. The Bayerischer Hof, a fortress of class, will serve as headquarters for a weekend of dissonant, unorthodox cultural interventions. What does it mean to host a so-called unconference in a place so steeped in exclusive power structures, where international security elites annually plot the future of global capital?
Fig. 1
Stephan Janitzky’s Instagram post today, quoting Brazilian philosopher Vladimir Safatle, strikes at the core of this juxtaposition: “Cynicism is not just a rhetorical figure or a subjective, morally reprehensible attitude; it forms the rational structure of a collapsing society that has found its survival strategy in insincere speech and self-ironic denial.” In this light, Janitzky’s post is not simply a critique but a call to recalibrate the methods of critique itself—how do you inhabit a structure like the Bayerischer Hof without reproducing its logic?
What Are People For? (Anna McCarthy, Paulina Nolte, Manuela Rzytki, Tom Wu) is a dystopian dance party, a poisonous collision of Tom Tom Club’s irreverence and Throbbing Gristle’s confrontational noise. With their concert (08.05, 8:30 pm), the 'unconference' prepares its sonic form: a series of dissonant anthems for the age of climate collapse, austerity, and precarity.
But as the event says, Where’s Tea, There’s Hope (May 10, 1:30 am). That is as awkward as it is vital, and artist Anna Maja Spiess stages this late-night tea ceremony at Trader Vic’s, the tropical-themed cocktail bar ensconced in the Bayerischer Hof. The absurdity of performing a tea ritual in this setting—a faux-colonial fantasia of kitschy tiki decor—makes it a microcosm of the entire unconference: an attempt to exorcise the colonial specters while still sipping their cocktails. This is a spiritual experience as Slavoj Žižek describes it—a cycle of mockery and self-mockery, ideology laid bare and then immediately reabsorbed in the performance of critique itself.
Fig. 2
Under the glass dome of Bayerischer Hof’s atrium, Filter Café by Ruscha Voormann and Milen Till invites visitors to engage with artists and curators over cake on May 10 and 11, 2025, from 11 am to 4 pm. The centerpiece, “Kuppelkuchen,” a sculptural cake mimicking the dome’s architecture, serves as a critique of power and exclusivity, sliced and shared during the talks at 1 pm and 3 pm each day.
In the cocktail lounge, a site of elite addiction, the act of printmaking becomes an act of material resistance. Puell and Hurzlmeier, alongside Knust Kunz Gallery, resurrect lithography and linocut as proletarian techniques—an assertion of manual labor, of ink and paper, against the dematerialized logic of the art market. In a place where champagne usually flows, ink now spills, each print a declaration that meaning is made through hands, not algorithms, at the Printing Press. (10.05, 11 am - 4 pm)
Quoting Beuys’ 'Global-Art-Fusion' project, Martin Fengel’s intervention Sorry Fax Only (10.05, 11:30 pm) extends the critique of art as commodity into the realm of instantaneity and global exchange. Perhaps the most telling intervention, since a live fax exchange in the Bayerischer Hof’s fax room—a relic of analog communication within a hyper-connected world, a wink to the past in a setting that pretends to be the future.
If the Bayerischer Hof is a citadel of power, its corridors are the back channels where power truly circulates. Olga Hohmann’s performance Off the Record (11.05, 9 am) dissects for early birds the unspoken, unofficial transactions that take place in the spaces between official panels—those invisible yet crucial negotiations that shape policy and profit. This is the architecture of capitalist diplomacy—coffee tables, corridors, and bars, where what is unsaid is often more decisive than what is proclaimed.
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Sunday’s mood is to address the declining public funding for cultural institutions and the precariousness of art workers. Andrea Lissoni, Natalia Sielewicz, and Noura Dirani gather for the panel Art Institutions at the Crossroads: Audiences and Engagement (11.05, 10 am) to share what it means to lead an institution in a city like Munich, where wealth and cultural capital coexist with rising precarity. The question of how art institutions can sustain critical programming without being subsumed by private interests looms large.
For lunch, Isaac Julien, Anri Sala, and Tourmaline’s films present histories of resistance and survival that cut through the veil of official narratives with Hold Fast to Dreams – Screening at the Bayerischer Hof Cinema (11.05, 12 pm). Each work connects personal memory with collective trauma, turning the hotel’s plush cinema into a space where the marginalized are not only seen but heard—where dreams hold against the tide of gentrification and erasure.
The Unconference is not alone in these contradictions. Various Others sprawls across Munich, transforming its institutional nodes into sites of potential rupture. Kalas Liebfried and Voin de Voin’s conversation (May 11, 12 pm) at Lothringer 13 Halle will ask: 'How do we organize in times of chaos?' Their exchange promises to be less about proposing solutions and more about holding open a space for collective disorientation—a state that might be the necessary first step toward organizing at all.
Fig. 4
So, what is too soon to say? And what is there left to say about the decaying, self-exploitative art market? The program that Christian Ganzenberg, Lucrezia Levi Morenos, their team, and the entire local eco-system of galleries, institutions and art workers behind Various Others are putting together is the perfect encapsulation of this year’s theme: the ironic recognition that nothing ever really goes away, that power and its symbols haunt every attempt at critique, and that the absurd and the critical are entwined in ways that make disentangling them 'too soon to say.'
But it is never too much to remind ourselves that those who have created a stage to stay against the ruins insist, in the face of entropy, that we are not yet done here.
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The full programme for the opening weekend and the entire duration of VARIOUS OTHERS is available here: variousothers.com/events
Fig. 5
- Images
Cover: Pei-Yi Tsai, Avoidance, 2024, Oil & Acrylic on canvas. 36 x 26 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Paulina Caspari.
Fig. 1 - Candida Höfer, Augustiner Chorherrenstift Sankt Florian III,
2014. © Candida Höfer, Köln, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
Fig. 2 - Preview of Ruscha Voormann and Milen Till's Filter Cafe, Courtesy of Galerie Crone
Fig. 3 - „Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia” Ausstellungsansicht. Foto:
Maximilian Geuter. Courtesy of Haus der Kunst 2024
Fig. 4 - Birgit Jürgenssen, l’après midi, 2001, Videostill. Courtesy Nachlass Birgit Jürgenssen
Fig. 5 - Kalas Liebfried, Ecocide, 2025. Courtesy of Lothringer13 Halle.
