“Off to somewhere else” is the motto of the current season of the Münchner Kammerspiele. “Off to somewhere else” sounds like a departure in a positive sense. However, the current austerity debate about the city’s cultural budget does not sound at all like a departure in a positive sense. Anyone who follows this debate and sees how much the municipal theaters have to save – at the Volkstheater the budget is shrinking by 2.9 million euros compared to 2023, at the Kammerspiele it is even 6.2 million euros – the motto must almost seem like one Cassandra call appears. Because if the savings come as announced, it would “mean a different theater than before,” and the damage would be “maximum,” said Kammerspiel director Barbara Mundel in an interview with SZ. “These sums mean the end of the Kammerspiele.”

Munich cuts cultural budget
:“The damage that would now occur would be maximum”
The planned million-dollar cuts endanger Munich’s municipal theaters. Kammerspiel director Barbara Mundel and Volkstheater director Christian Stückl about an impending end – and the intention to fight.
That’s why the municipal theater wants to take a stand against clear-cutting. And the season motto “Off to somewhere else” continues to be understood positively. This means that the Kammerspiele want to take their imagery and imagery beyond the edge of the stage and into the city, explains Daniel Veldhoen, the Kammerspiele’s artistic director. This also includes cross-disciplinary collaborations with other artistic institutions, such as the one with the Munich Contemporary Organization photography The griffin. Their global call to give the season’s motto a visual face resulted in 1,000 submissions from 82 countries.

There were already contacts with Çağla Ilk, co-director of the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and curator of the German pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. And so they were asked to make a selection from the many submissions from Germany to Russia to Iran and Singapore, from Canada to the USA to Mexico. Ilk selected 40 photographs of artists between the ages of 25 and 74, which became the basis for the image campaign for the 2024/25 season at the Kammerspiele. The motifs could also be seen as large-format posters throughout the city in September.
And until the end of October they will also be shown as a photo exhibition on the glass facade of the Therese-Giehse-Halle. By the way, different motifs inside and outside. There is also a very special-looking art publication by The Gripping with eight large-format DIN A2 posters folded to DIN A4. And there are postcards in the Habibi Kiosk at the Kammerspiele that you can send, but you can also use them to create an interactive exhibition wall.

And what motivates the photographers about the topic “Off to somewhere else”? What do you want to make visible beyond the actual image content? How to fill the so-called “blind fields”? The Turkish photographer Berk Kır from Istanbul takes a stand on the role of women with his ambiguous photograph “You Have a Place Above My Head”. Diversity and freedom, even in the face of limited conditions, resonate with the Munich photographer Anna Pentzlin. Your protagonist in “Nothing but internet fake friends,” dressed in pink tulle, seems to be still searching for his own identity. Paul Hiller, also from Munich, discovered a photo of the globe at the planetarium in Vienna’s Prater, which is so fenced in by a flight of stairs that it can make you feel anxious about the openness of the world.

International photographer Elena Paraskeva, who lives in Cyprus, has transformed the popular Cypriot seaside resort of Ayia Napa into an absurd pool scene in classic Miami Art Deco colors. Ana Hell from Spain staged a sophisticated look into the mirror in Turkey, perhaps asking us whether, given all the self-reflection, we still have eyes for the world around us?
The themes and motifs of the photo campaign are as diverse as the Kammerspiele program. There is a lot of staged photography, but also found situational comedy and landscape and street scenes. Some convey sadness and emptiness, but for many it is primarily curiosity about the foreign and the hope for – hopefully positive – new things. So let’s go somewhere else.
Off to somewhere else, Therese Giehse Hall of the Kammerspiele, until the end of October