Interview with Kathleen Reinhardt

 

»We should learn to cope with the discomfort of history«

Kathleen Reinhardt

 

 

Ms. Reinhardt, you’ve announced new site-specific works for Venice that are intended to reposition the major themes of the German Pavilion within a different framework. What does that mean, specifically?

Almost all artistic projects in the German Pavilion so far have focused on Germany’s past. Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu will turn their attention to recent German history, which remains an issue for our present. When Francis Fukuyama spoke of the end of history in the summer of 1989, that was not the end indeed. The point is that what the German Pavilion has repeatedly engaged with is now undergoing a renewal through artistic positions that, instead of the past, make the immediate present the subject of critical reflection. I’m curating a pavilion whose art is contemporary and at the same time engages with various aspects of history, thus thinking in different directions.

 

What are those directions, and how did you come up with them?

My ideas were not intended to make up for what has been neglected in recent decades through a retrospective review. Rather, I have been considering which positions in Germany represent contemporary art and speak to the German context, while also contributing to the international discourse.

 

What are the advantages of a pavilion featuring two artistic positions?

My focus wasn’t on the number, but specifically on these two positions. With Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu, I am showcasing two artists from a generation that has long engaged artistically and intellectually with the contemporary German landscape and the landscape of memory.

 

When the artists were announced, many media outlets placed a strong emphasis on their upbringing in East Germany. You, too, grew up partly in the GDR. What did you think of that initial reaction?

Of course, the history of Germany plays a major role in my thinking and my curatorial work. In that regard, I’m also interested, for example, in the history of the GDR Pavilion, or in who was shown in Venice starting in 1990 — and, conversely, who wasn’t considered “worthy of a pavilion.” Women were relatively rarely represented, and an East German background was not considered relevant. Maybe now we are more willing to look at this with greater consciousness; after all, it’s also a generational issue.

 

What do you think of the architecture of the German Pavilion?

The pavilion is a massive structure, a reality set in stone, and will always remind me of what happened in the 1930s. I find it fascinating and important that this building exists in its current form, constantly challenging us to grapple with it and the context in which it was built.

 

How would you define a successful pavilion?

The pavilion exhibitions are making art history in real time. The Venice Biennale looks back on 130 years of history, and it always reflects contemporary events as well, which is particularly fascinating in retrospect. It’s therefore also about showcasing the status quo of 2026. This applies to art, to the social discussions taking place here in dialogue with an international context and the exhibition venue of Venice. There are many layers that give the pavilion its significance.

 

We are currently witnessing a rise in nationalism, isolationism, and the drawing of borders. What role does Venice’s traditional concept of national pavilions and national representation play in this context?

Maybe it’s particularly interesting right now to view Venice within this historical continuum, because most people don’t want to see the national reduced to its essence. Yet we are suddenly thrust back into a space where precisely this happens. The individual pavilions, as manifestations of their nationalities, have long been called into question. But suddenly a new reality — one none of us wanted — is imposing itself with tremendous force. We were incredibly fortunate to have lived in peace for so long that we could question all of this.

 

The Venice Biennale is praised as the mother of all biennales. What relevance does such a major international event have today?

The Venice Biennale is and remains unique. That has to do with the connection to the international art world, the city itself, and its unique history, and cannot be replicated by biennales elsewhere. This is one reason why I also wish to see the German Pavilion within the context of its institutional history — with all its iterations, the changes to the building, the impact of various political systems in Italy, and the ongoing dialogue with contemporary art over the years.

 

For you, it’s a kind of return to Venice.

Venice is where I discovered art for myself. In 2006, I did an internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection at the end of my studies. It’s an incredibly special place; it was a private residence before it became a museum. Back then, I was truly inspired by the realization that art has a lot to do with history and the specific circumstances and people under which it was created.

 

You are currently working on securing funding and raising capital. How are you approaching this challenge, and what does the budget look like?

The ifa (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations), which serves as the commissioner of the German Pavilion and is funded by the Federal Foreign Office, provides a base budget. And that is the responsibility of the curator. The necessary costs rise every year. Transporting artworks, materials, and labor are becoming more expensive. Given the current economic situation and tight public budgets for culture, securing financial support is not easy.

 

Before you started working for museums about ten years ago, you ran the studios of Candice Breitz and Petrit Halilaj in Berlin. What did you learn about the art world there?

For me, it’s very important to be close to the artist’s perspective. I want to understand every aspect of artistic practice, even if it’s uncomfortable or if I don’t necessarily agree with certain elements of it. That’s also how I see my role as a curator. Working with living artists is something very special because you’re truly part of the entire journey. The differences in working methods are always incredibly fascinating, and it is a privilege to participate in the often-challenging processes of developing and translating a kind of wild thinking.

 

Between 2016 and 2022, you served as curator and conservator of contemporary art at the Albertinum, part of the Dresden State Art Collections, where you curated an exhibition with Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt in 2018–2019 that helped spark her rediscovery. How did you become aware of the artist?

Through the American artist David Horvitz, who was also part of the exhibition. I’ve been friends with him for a long time. David visited Ruth in Berlin in 2014 to do some research and discovered the “Typewritings” from the 1970s in her archive. After this initial encounter, the two engaged in a lively mail art exchange, even though Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt had not been artistically active since the end of the GDR. David had told me about this, and that’s what’s so exciting: I really want to follow the artists and always ask them what positions inspire them. I’m interested in this artistic thinking and its coordinate system.

 

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeld, together with her husband, played an important role in East German art. With your exhibition on Angela Davis in Dresden, you’ve also opened a chapter of unwritten art history. How did that come about?

For me, it’s important to relate a local or regional context to something bigger. Take Horvitz and Rehfeldt, for example, where art served as a means of communication and a nucleus across different systems and generations. I found that very moving. With the Angela Davis exhibition it was the same. I wanted to connect a specific historical moment with the present — one that could have been a great opportunity to change things. On the one hand, there was the ambivalent role Angela Davis played for my parents’ generation, who grew up in the GDR. On the other hand, her significance goes far beyond that, because as an academic and scholar in the 1980s and 1990s, Davis laid the groundwork for our intellectual landscape today. She set standards for intersectional thinking, for instance. I find it insightful to connect these different contexts and view them through the eyes of artists and through their works.

 

The exhibition coincided with two momentous historical events: the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic. How did that influence your work?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was extremely difficult — if not impossible — to present museum spaces as safe places. Museums would have met all the necessary conditions for this, starting with their sophisticated ventilation systems, the ability to regulate access, and much more. It was shocking to see how the museum sector was apparently not taken seriously, nor was its social relevance recognized, especially during this specific crisis.

 

With 15 museums, the Dresden State Art Collections is Germany’s second-largest museum association. In 2022, you took over as director of the Georg Kolbe Museum. What challenges did this move to a small institution located outside Berlin’s city center present?

When you work in an institution with predominantly historical collections, you often have relatively limited leeway in the contemporary sphere. Restrictive structures and regulations sometimes make it difficult to work with innovative artistic approaches, since you are often the only curator on the team who works with living artists who have their own expectations regarding the exhibition context.

A small institution like the Georg Kolbe Museum is much more agile. Many things are simpler and can be decided directly and quickly. I can decide for myself which conceptual aspects I want to focus on and try out new approaches. In large museums, on the other hand, introducing new methods is usually only possible at the theoretical level, because implementing change processes is incredibly complex.

 

How is the Kolbe estate organized? And what impact does Berlin’s austerity policy have?

We are severely understaffed. Curator Elisa Tamaschke and I are the only ones with full-time positions. Everyone else is working in mini-jobs, has temporary project-based positions, or works part-time. It’s difficult to do solid work with such a fragile network. Due to austerity measures, this network is now being cut up even further. This is a major challenge for everyone, and it raises the question: where can we even cut costs anymore? The scale of the cuts demanded in the cultural sector is not at all clear to the general public. Specifically, this is about jobs and the preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. I have a great team that supports the institution in every way and often pushes itself to its limits to make this happen.

 

The museum did not have an exhibition budget even before the budget cuts?

It was a very modest portion that could be allocated to exhibitions and often served as proof of our own funds, which was necessary to even apply for grants. Because for everything — exhibitions, programs, and research — we have to secure external funding. On top of that, repairs are an ongoing issue at the Georg Kolbe Museum, which is a listed building. There is no money to repair the elevator, which has been out of order for weeks, and thus ensure accessibility. The trees are old and are dying due to rapidly changing climatic conditions. I have no budget to replant them. That is a huge burden. We all fear that something breaks, wondering if we will be able to repair it.

 

Georg Kolbe is a historically ambivalent figure. The anniversary exhibition “Tea and Dry Biscuits” pays tribute to the sculptor while also challenging the myth surrounding him. How did you approach the museum’s 75th anniversary?

There remains a fascination with the beautiful bodies Kolbe created. On the other hand, this understanding of the body has also undergone constant change within the political systems through which he, as a sculptor, always navigated with great success. In the first part of the anniversary year, we took a step back — exploring the founding of the museum after Kolbe’s death in an international dialogue with various contemporary perspectives. In the second part, there will be a contrast between Kolbe’s male figures and photographs by Herbert List, featuring a few contemporary guests. This is also reflected in research interests. The Kolbe Archive is the largest complete sculptor’s archive from the first half of the 20th century in Germany, containing an enormous amount of correspondence with private individuals, artists, collectors, dealers, and gallery owners from that period. It documents Kolbe’s proximity to the powerful figures of various eras — from the German Empire through National Socialism to the immediate postwar period and up to his death in 1947 — and makes his activities in the respective markets and within the shifting political systems comprehensible.

 

To what extent do you feel obligated to honor Kolbe’s legacy, even as you critically examine it? Where do the limits of criticism of him as a person lie?

The return of the so-called Canada Collection to Berlin in 2020 marked a major turning point for the institution. The collection consisted of more than a hundred boxes of letters, diaries, and photographs from Georg Kolbe’s estate, which his granddaughter and the museum’s second director, Maria von Tiesenhausen, had taken to Canada during the 1970s. Only then was it possible to reconstruct the 1930s and 1940s. Whereas the focus previously was more on showcasing the quality of the works, my task now is to establish a critical framework so that this institution can remain relevant for another 75 years. Times have fundamentally changed. Today’s museum audience no longer sees only the aesthetics of a work; they want to understand how certain positions have developed within their specific context and what implications this has for the present and the future.

 

How does the regular audience react? The moldy oranges by Spanish artist Álvaro Urbano don’t exactly evoke a festive mood.

All the exhibitions we present always work on a purely aesthetic level as well. Even without reading the wall text, visitors have an artistic experience in a very special place. But if you delve deeper, something else unfolds. We should learn to cope with this discomfort of history.

 

A groundbreaking publication by your predecessor, Julia Wallner, on Georg Kolbe during the Nazi era has emerged from the Canada estate. What are the new insights on this issue?

Kolbe was much closer to power in every political system than previously assumed, even though he did not consider himself a political figure. This also has something to do with the art of portraiture itself. Only an exclusive circle had their portraits painted by artists at certain times. For example, during World War I, Kolbe created a portrait of Enver Pasha in the Ottoman Empire, who later became one of the main perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide — a theme addressed by the artist Hande Server in the commissioned work created for this exhibition. Or, in one of the letters currently on display at the museum, Hitler expresses his gratitude for a work by Kolbe that a trading company had given him as a birthday present: a bust of the Spanish general Franco. Much can be understood simply by looking at the circle of people involved. We are currently in the process of putting the pieces of the puzzle together, on the one hand at the institutional level through research and educational programs, and on the other hand at the artistic level by inviting contemporary artists to engage critically with his work. In this way, Kolbe’s life and work can become relevant to the present.

 

To whom and why is Kolbe relevant today?

I’m fascinated by how artists refer to Kolbe’s work in their own creations or engage with it. Whether it is Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, who is represented in the exhibition with a small collage about Kolbe, or Heike Kabisch, who has kept Kolbe’s body study notebook (Körperstudienbuch) in her studio for two decades and emphasizes that, for her, Kolbe is someone who depicted the human body like no one else. Furthermore, many conceptually oriented artists are interested in the political dimension of Kolbe as a person. But of course, the location is also central — for the museum is the only publicly accessible artist’s studio from the 1920s in Berlin and is situated in a minimalist Bauhaus-style house, co-designed by the artist himself, in the midst of a wooded garden. An architectural gem.

 

How much of the estate has been researched? Are there any surprises in store?

Certainly, because the estate is far from having been fully researched. We can only proceed in small steps. We have just made the catalog of the sculptures available to the public online. My hope for the future is to award research grants to art historians who work with the archive, which is the museum’s true treasure.

 

As part of an open research project, you recently conducted an in-depth study of Kolbe’s Dancers’ Fountain (“Tänzerinnenbrunnen”) which was originally commissioned by Heinrich Stahl. The Jewish businessman was expropriated by the Nazis and murdered at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. How do you deal with this Nazi-looted art?

The example of the Dancers’ Fountain illustrates the two dimensions within the archive and the museum: On the one hand, there is art and its reception, which includes a specific visual language and visual politics that pose a challenge for us today. On the other hand, there is the history of the object, which can only be revealed through research and its publication. The major task before me is to further open the museum to such critical and sometimes contradictory questions. How can the institution — precisely in the face of often very uncomfortable truths, whether in its own institutional history or in problematic visual programs — find ways to make this relevant, act accordingly, and thus contribute to public discourse and historical justice?

As part of our research project on the Fountain, we have begun to reconstruct the fate of the Stahl family. This also involves finding updated forms of remembrance, with all the implications that entails. It was important to us to link the history of Nazi persecution with today’s understanding of decolonial interpretations and remembrance, because this is what first strikes the observer, and to keep this alive in an open process of coming to terms with the past, together with the interested public. The publication, the educational and discourse program, and artistic contributions such as David Hartt’s are first steps in that direction.

 

What is your response to the criticism you’ve faced from the press? What conclusions have you drawn from this?

In the wall text for the accompanying research exhibition and in the announcements, we did not use the technical term “cultural property confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution” in reference to the Fountain. This was not intentional, but it was incorrect and drew criticism. The Fountain is cultural property confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution; we have made that clear. We are now focusing on finding a fair and just solution, together with the descendants of Heinrich Stahl. We are a learning institution and seek critical dialogue with artists, experts, the public, and, in this case, above all, the descendants, regarding how the object and its history should and can be handled moving forward. Now that we have located the descendants in the U.S., discussions are currently underway to discuss next steps and clarify legal details.

 

What scenarios are possible?

Many scenarios are possible, as we are, of course, committed to the Washington Principles and are doing everything in our power to find a fair and just solution. The first step is to find out what solution the descendants desire and then to act on it. That is exactly what we have tried to do with the Dancers’ Fountain: to proactively initiate dialogue with the descendants and involve the public, rather than negotiating a restitution matter behind closed doors and merely summarizing the results in a press release. The museum makes itself vulnerable when I say: We don’t know a lot of things yet and would like to figure them out in an iterative process together with the descendants, experts, and the public in order to take action. I’m convinced that an institution should not cling to objects. We must move away from these boundaries in order to shape the present and future together and fairly.

 

 

Editor’s Note, April 2026: This interview was conducted in early July 2025 and published in the 04/2025 issue (print edition) of the Museumsjournal. Henrike Naumann died unexpectedly of cancer on February 14, 2026, in Berlin. In mid-February 2026, the Georg Kolbe Museum announced that the “Dancers’ Fountain”, a cultural asset previously confiscated due to Nazi persecution, would be returned to the rightful heirs of the Jewish former owner family, the Heinrich Stahls.