It’s hard to think of a less radical place than Luxembourg City’s business quarter. The Kirchberg Plateau, as it’s known, is an administrative enclave of offices and people in suits bookended by the European Parliament’s Secretariat to the northeast and the European Court of Justice to the southwest. A stone’s throw from the latter is the Mudam Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg’s biggest contemporary art institution. Its incumbent and fourth director, Bettina Steinbrügge, was appointed in 2022. The endemic bureaucracy and moderation that typifies Luxembourgish culture stand between her and laying down an edgy, provocative cultural program. She’s doing her best to shake things up.
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“It’s going very well, but it’s not without its frictions,” she told ARTnews in a softly spoken yet determined German accentat the opening of two exhibitions at Mudam on July 11 – “Xanti Schawinsky: Play Life Illusion” and “Agnieszka Kurant: Risk Landscape.” “Changing management in any museum is always extremely difficult. It’s getting better and we are getting there, but it’s not easy. We have higher visitor numbers [up 15 percent]. We’ve changed many things, like looking into artists who can deal with this architecture.”
She meant Mudam’s grided glass windows that trap heat. The state-funded museum is an unintended hothouse. It was designed by Chinese American architect Ieoh Ming Pei. He retrofitted the stone ruins of Luxembourg City’s Fort Thüngen in the style of the west wing of Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, which he also drew. Good looking? Debatable.
“It was built in the optimistic nineties, this is not a sustainable building,” she added. “It gets very hot so we’re having conversations about working with artists in the future who can work in a greenhouse, like Vivian Suter. It’s highly exciting to think about using this space according to its conditions… from the outside it’s a fortress but on the inside it’s vulnerable on many levels.”
Steinbrügge’s struggle to be more daring has ruffled some feathers. She pointed to her commission and curation of Jason Dodge’s Tomorrow I walked to a dark black star installation. In layman’s terms, it’s a load of trash currently scattered across two of the museum’s floors. In artistic terms, it asks viewers to “think of a pocket emptied out on any day, the traces of a part of use can be seen in bits of paper, some coins, a ticket for something, some dust, proof you were here, proof you were living.”
“I caused a huge scandal with Dodge… the museum team was so angry, the cleaners kept trying to remove it,” she said. Some of the higher-ups, however, were pleased with the conversations the piece was sparking, she added. “People made such amazing memes [of the installation]. It was the talk of the town and also society dinners.”
So, she enjoys causing a bit of a stir? “I do, yes,” Steinbrügge said mischievously. “I’m not a conservative museum director.”
One of her first projects at Mudam’s helm was curating “A Model,” an ongoing group exhibition with 37 artists which she described as an “experiment.” It includes Dodge’s trash installation, a series of benches by Finnigan Shannon, and I am paper, a performance piece based on Tomaso Binga’s poetry.
[“A Model”] brings everything together that I’ve done in my curatorial life,” she said. “When I arrived here, this museum had a very specific way of working with the collection and its architecture, and I wasn’t so fond of it. The museum is now bigger than its six galleries because I’m using all of the transition space as well. We want immersive spaces.”
Performance is important to Steinbrügge and she wants to bring more of it to Luxembourg and incorporate the artform into Mudam’s permanent collection. “In Europe, especially in Germany, all of the museums have the same collection… I want to commission more works for this collection that are connected to Luxembourg,” she said. “We are working on changing the program. We don’t want to have summer openings any more – but we want to have a performance season each summer.”
In her former role as the managing director of Kunstverein in Hamburg, a non-profit contemporary art center in Germany, she didn’t hold back. “Kunstverein provided me with a space to go crazy,” she explained. “With Peaches [the Canadian performance artist and musician], I organized her first and only show on a double masturbator with kinetic sculptures and a light performance that last six hours. It was really funny.”
Mudam’s board of directors was obviously drawn to Steinbrügge’s risqué cultural approach before she was hired. She’s certainly a more left field choice than her predecessor, the Australian Susanne Cotter, who was appointed in 2018. “I need the freedom to experiment,” the German said, “otherwise I can’t work.”
Cotter invited international artists like Suki Seokyeong, Dahn Vo, and Leonor Antunes to exhibit at Mudam before moving on to direct the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
Whether Steinbrügge brings Peaches and her dildos to Luxembourg remains to be seen. For now, though, it’s unlikely given she’s trying to engage more families and children. There are plans to build a playground and an “arena for teenagers so they can hang out and smoke their first cigarette, or do whatever teenagers do.”
Steinbrügge said Cotter “opened up the museum to the world” but the German is now taking Mudam in “two directions.” “For example, I’m opening it up with a Bauhaus artist [Schawinsky] – but not a mainstream Bauhaus artist – and combining it with a contemporary performance. I am fostering performance. We can have the weirdest performance and people come.”
She was talking about British artist Monster Chetwynd, who was invited to create an installation – titled Xanti Shenanigans – in response to Schawinsky’s oeuvre and retrospective, “Xanti Schawinsky: Play Life Illusion.” The installation was accompanied by a performance by Chetwynd and per [the artist asked to be referred to by the pronouns “ze” and “per”] troupe on the evening of Mudam’s July 11 summer party.
Performance art is often an acquired taste and Xanti Shenanigans was an unprepared riff on the British dating show “Blind Date” that felt like a bad school play. Will it make Mudam’s permanent collection? Perhaps not.
That being said, Schawinsky’s son, Daniel – who was in the crowd – told ARTnews that his dad “probably would have liked it.” Thorsten Blume, an artistic associate of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, was also at the event and apparently approved. “He came up to me after the performance and said very interesting responses,” Chetwynd told ARTnews. “One was that it contained pure ‘positivity.’ He invited me to do a residency at the Bauhaus HQ. I also had a lot of people who enjoyed the performance without speaking English – this is important to me, I usually work with mime. This time I wrote a careful script. The action and use of the set were all carefully planned to allow of flow of action that anyone could enjoy…I saw a glowing mass of excited faces in the audience, I am not in any delusional state, the audience loved the performance. I worked hard for months. They know when they are being served a great dish.”
Steinbrügge forewarned ARTnews about her programing before Chetwynd’s skit, “Some people will understand – and some won’t.” These words might just forge the German’s legacy in Luxembourg.
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