Søren Aagaard – Exhibition of the Ruhrfestspiele 2024

May 5 – August 4, 2024

The Danish artist Søren Aagaard (*1980) questions the performative potential of food and art in a wide variety of contexts. Who cooks what, and for whom? A closer look quickly reveals that food is a highly controversial topic. Aagard’s witty and carefully researched exhibition transforms the kitchen, the center of the domestic realm, into a performative-sculptural setting. Who would have thought that cooking and art have so much in common?

In everyday life, cooking is usually functional, but in Aagaard's works, places where food is produced and presented are examined as social and aestheticized spaces. His exhibitions pose important questions about cultural identity and appropriation, social structures and disparities, the distribution channels of ingredients and the tools of processing, as well as workers in kitchens and restaurants around the world. Aagard also probes surprising similarities with the cultural sector.

Following numerous solo and group exhibitions, for instance at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde and the Performa Biennale in New York, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen is proud to present Søren Aagaard's first solo museum exhibition in Germany as part of the Ruhrfestspiele. This summer, the kitchen – oftentimes relegated to cultural margins – moves to the center of the Kunsthalle and into urban spaces as a place of sculptural practice. Søren Aagaard invites the public to rethink their relationship to culinary spaces and to challenge the cultural rituals concerning food and art in a participatory framework program. For his 2017 exhibition in Berlin, Aagaard created an entire repertoire of French fry sauces in an outdoor swimming pool; in Amsterdam, he offered visitors an early-twentieth-century recipe from a Futurists' cookbook. Let’s find out what master chef Aagaard has cooked up for the Ruhrfestspiele audience!

The exhibition will be accompanied by a performance program. Further information will follow.

Opening on May 4, 4 pm
Public guided tours every Sunday at noon

A ticket to Ruhrfestspiele performances on the same day entitles the holder to visit the exhibition free of charge.