An invitation to immerse yourself in the world of modern and contemporary creation.

The Mudam Akademie offers an introduction to modern and contemporary art, showing how artists of the past and the present act as inventors of aesthetic universes, as well as catalysts and interpreters of major societal events.

In direct dialogue with Mudam’s wide-ranging exhibition programme, this lecture series demonstrates that the museum seeks to be an open space that remains attentive to the world’s transformations. Accessible to both, newcomers and more experienced audiences, the Mudam Akademie aims to make art history approachable for everyone.

The Mudam Akademie is organised in collaboration with the Ministry of National Education, Children and Youth.

This series is conceived and led by Fanny Weinquin.

Session 1 – 22.10.2025 
Who is the artist today? Singularity, erasure, co-creation 
In dialogue with Andrea Mancini & Every Island. A Comparative Dialogue Act 
How has the figure of the artist been constructed throughout the history of Western art? From the solitary Romantic genius to artist-corporations, this session traces the transformations of the artist’s status and role, in a time when collaborative practices and collective work are on the rise. The session will also examine the increasing importance of dual and collective formats in a context in which traditional forms of creation are being redefined.

Session 2 – 19.11.2025 
Making art today: materiality, gestures and narratives 
In dialogue with Radio Luxembourg: Echoes across borders 
Since the 20th-century avant-gardes, artists have expanded their material palette and, with it they haveoverturned hierarchies and conferred critical meaning to their medium. Through contemporary approaches such as expanded sculpture, this session explores how gestures, materials and forms convey social, ecological and political worlds.

Session 3 – 10.12.2025 – Single session, In conversation (EN) 
Moving images: cinema, memory and alterity 
In dialogue with Tiffany Sia – Phantasmatic Screens 
How do contemporary artists use video to explore history, exile, diasporic imagination or collective memory? This session proposes to reflect on expanded cinema, the deconstruction of national narratives and the potential of the image to represent states of temporal instability. It highlights intersections between research, visual essay and cinematic experimentation.

Session 4 – 14.01.2026 
Bodies in action: feminist art, gender and identity politics 
In dialogue with Eleanor Antin – A Retrospective 
This session traces the history of feminist and queer artistic practices, emphasising the performativity of the body, critique of representation norms and self-staging as a political tool. It also examines how these critical gestures are passed on to contemporary generations.

Session 5 – 11.02.2026 
Weaving, repairing, transmitting: textile art and sensitive ecologies 
In dialogue with Igshaan Adams 
Through practices of weaving, thread, knotting and repetition, many contemporary artists value artisanal skills, care practices and communal narratives. This session explores textile as a material that embodies postcolonial language, as well as a tool for repair and a medium that reifies traces of collective memory.

Session 6 – 11.03.2026 – Single session, In conversation (EN) 
Representation in the age of new media: fiction, image and screen culture 
In dialogue with Simon Fujiwara 
Contemporary art appropriates codes from our image-centered society, from entertainment and from social media, playing with their staged artificial nature. This session explores how artists reuse, subvert and transform these visual languages to question representation and rethink the construction of cultural identities in a world saturated with images and digital stimuli.

Session 7 – 15.04.2026 
Painting after painting: gestures, materials, narratives 
In dialogue with Painting Spotlight – Mudam Collection 
Although painting has often been declared ‘dead’, it continues to reinvent itself at the intersection of other media, between abstraction and narrative, figuration and archival practice. This session examines the complex status of painting today: a return to gestures, hybridisation of formats and extended temporalities.

Session 8 – 13.05.2026 
Art as performance: bodies, gestures, activation 
In dialogue with Perform, Inform, Transform 
Since the 1960s, performance has become a normalised practice in the context of contemporary art. This session will revisit the foundations of performance, stemming from various movements (Fluxus, Body Art). We will also observe its current position in the institutional context, currently located somewhere between ritual, activation, dance, engagement and experimentation.

Session 9 – 10.06.2026 – Single session, In conversation with Bettina Steinbrügge (EN) 
Contemporary art and research in the documentary era 
In dialogue with Joyce Joumaa 
How do artists appropriate investigative, documentary or archival tools to produce new forms of knowledge? This session explores art as a critical apparatus, mobilising data, testimonies, satellite images, oral narratives or visual archives, navigating between fiction and reality.

Session 10 – 08.07.2026 
Imagining tomorrow: art, ecology and worlds to come 
In dialogue with Ana Vaz (upcoming exhibition) 
As environmental upheavals redefine our relationship to the world, contemporary art becomes a space for experimentation; a space to imagine new forms of coexistence. Between anxiety and the desire to expand their horizons, artists examine places as a network of interdependencies and sketched futures, where boundaries between humans and non-humans blur.

Biography
Fanny Weinquin is a Belgian-Luxembourgish art historian and independent curator, whose practice unfolds at the intersection of heritage, contemporary creation and societal issues. Trained in Brussels and Bologna, she has worked in Belgium, France, Estonia and Luxembourg, where she will join the curatorial team of Villa Vauban in 2025. Shaped by a hybrid cultural identity and a cross-border perspective, her curatorial approach explores the connections between memory, sensitive ecologies and exhibition contexts.