"I only like to spend my time where I feel welcome and addressed."

The Kunstpalast reopened in November 2023. The declared aim is to attract people to the museum who are unfamiliar with art. Felix Krämer, General Director and Artistic Director of the Kunstpalast, and his team have implemented an overall concept that presents art in a new way. Visiting the museum becomes a pleasure. Everyone should feel welcome. The Kunstpalast app, augmented reality and the rooms for children designed by Christoph Niemann contribute to this. In the first part of our Deep Dive Kunstpalast, Felix Krämer explains the concept and why the Rhino Palast is important to him for children.

Redesigning, renovating and refurbishing a museum like the Kunstpalast is a mammoth project in itself. You have taken the opportunity to reinterpret the institution of the museum, particularly from the point of view of wanting to reach all people with art. What inspired you to do this? And how do you reach people who might not otherwise go to museums?
Museum work is not just about entertaining the museum-going public in the best possible way, but also about appealing to people who have not visited museums since childhood. Many art lovers are unaware that museums can be places of intimidation that function according to certain rules that are difficult for outsiders to understand. Despite the wide range on offer, only a minority of people in Germany visit art museums. The reasons for this are manifold and also have to do with the institutions themselves. The fact that a visit to a museum can be fun as well as providing new insights and impressions seems like an internal contradiction to many. However, the quality of the visit is the decisive criterion for a sense of well-being when visiting an exhibition. I only like to spend my time where I feel welcome and addressed. In order to put ourselves in the shoes of our (potential) visitors and think about the museum from their perspective, we set up the Palace Pilots group as part of the new presentation. The prerequisites for participation were curiosity and the desire to get involved in the redesign of the museum. Previous knowledge of art and museum topics was expressly not a criterion. Ten Düsseldorf residents - from teenagers to senior citizens, from game developers to police officers - were selected from over 1,000 applicants, with whom we have critically examined all aspects of the museum visit over the past three years.
In addition to the rather classic and deliberately restrained presentation of the collection, we have also developed an app together with our digital partner Ergo, which is available to all visitors free of charge and is intended to break down barriers to museum visits and increase accessibility and the fun factor.

You and your team have decided to establish a chronological tour. This means that works that were otherwise presented thematically separately are now juxtaposed. This gives us a different understanding of historical contexts and we are sometimes surprised at what took place simultaneously in one era. Can you explain the appeal of this? And how have visitors reacted to it so far?
Regardless of the art and cultural-historical context, every object receives the same attention in the new presentation of our collection. The rough chronological order of the collection, which is deliberately not sorted by genre or country of origin, provides orientation in terms of content. The juxtapositions aim to highlight the similarities between works created at the same time, free from stylistic and historical categorizations, and not - as is often the case - to emphasize what divides them. This results in surprising combinations, such as that of a 19th century Japanese Boro kimono with the painting "The Potato Harvest" by Max Liebermann, in which the clothing fabric of a Dutch peasant woman is related to that of the kimono. Elsewhere, sculptures of the Virgin Mary meet Buddha statues and communicate at eye level. The concept is very well received and intuitively understood by visitors. Ideally, this form of presentation triggers thought processes and leads to new ways of perceiving our world. Art historians generally like to retell art history as a stringent sequence of different styles and see this as a central task of art museums. Romanticism here, Baroque there; each ism has its place, often subdivided by country. These are all pigeonholes that serve the purpose of providing orientation in a deeply confusing terrain. The fact that art history is actually full of paths and byways, full of dead ends and trails that lead over uneven and barely accessible terrain is often forgotten. Museums in particular, with their collections that have grown over a long period of time, are in a position to follow such traces.

In our podcast "Alle Rhein!" you spoke very enthusiastically about wanting to get children interested in exhibitions. It seems to be a matter close to your heart. There is even a monthly program for parents with babies. Attracting children to art is obviously very important to you. And you seem to be an exception - at least in the German museum scene. What is your motivation?
Children are the visitors of the future. If we can't get them interested in museums at a young age, we'll soon have a problem. We try to appeal to all age groups: The very young with our children's audio tour, which we developed together with Tonies, older children and young adults with the new Kunstpalast app, which provides background information, but also offers fun features and adds augmented reality to the museum visit. We developed the app with our digital partner Ergo, who also enabled us to launch our own children's website, Rhino Palast, a few years ago. With "Kleine", the Kunstpalast has also established an exhibition format that offers a stage to very young artists - namely Düsseldorf's primary school children. My motivation is the genuine interest and the joy in the children's eyes when they realize that the Kunstpalast is also their place. A place where there is something for them and where they are taken seriously.

Christoph Niemann has designed the collection rooms for children, the Rhino Palace at the Kunstpalast. How did the rooms come about?
The artist and illustrator Christoph Niemann has developed special rooms exclusively for the Kunstpalast that are spread throughout the entire collection and specially designed for young visitors. In the Rhino Palace, children can go on a discovery tour, test the limits of their perception and playfully conquer the museum for themselves. Behind small doors with low-positioned handles, children can expect their very own museum world: pens that take on a life of their own, a fountain pen that paints stairs or a tunnel of flowing points of light at the end of which something unexpected is hidden. Christoph Niemann has designed a wide variety of optical illusions in a fun, creative and surprising way for children of all ages and the adults accompanying them. Using graphic elements, projections and light, he creates a play with perspectives, proportions and movement. Niemann's works convey that seeing is always also interpretation and perception is a creative process - this changes the way we look at art.
It was important to me to integrate our children's rooms directly into the tour of the collection and not to assign children a separate area. The Rhino Palast sees itself as an invitation to families to visit the museum together.

The reopening of the Kunstpalast was two months ago. Is there a surprising event, an encounter, that you will always remember about the opening and would like to share with us?
There are many events that will remain in my memory. But one of the best experiences was actually seeing the enthusiasm with which young children discover the Kunstpalast as their home - also thanks to the Tonie boxes. They feel at home here, as you could see from their body language. Children lying relaxed on the floor of a museum - I can hardly imagine a greater compliment!

kunstpalast.de

Interview: Cynthia Blasberg
Photos: Kunstpalast

Deep Dive is the new, multi-part series on our blog "Düsseldorf Stories". In it, we want to delve deeper into topics that are particularly exciting and relevant for Düsseldorf. In the second part of Deep Dive Kunstpalast, you can look forward to an interview with Joachim Sieber from Sieber Architekten, who is responsible for the conversion of the Kunstpalast.