Mudam Akademie

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.

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.

In dialogue with Tiffany Sia: Phantasmatic Screens 

With Boyd van Hoeij, responsible for programming at the Cinémathèque of the City of Luxembourg since late 2022

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.

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.

In dialogue with Igshaan Adams: Between Then and Now  

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.

In dialogue with Simon Fujiwara: A Whole New World 

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.

In dialogue with Seven Paintings – Seven Encounters. 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.

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.

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.

In dialogue with Ana Vaz 

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.