Museum Ostwall

At the end of June 2009 the Museum am Ostwall, which was opened in 1949, closed on the site that gave it its name, and moved, during the European Capital of Culture Year 2010, to make a new start as the Museum Ostwall (MO) in the Dortmunder U. The municipal art museum for art from the 20th century to the present day, displays its collection on the 4th and 5th floors of the Dortmunder U. Works of Fluxus, an art movement of the 60s that wanted to recombine art with life, are the core of the collection on the 4th floor. From there the path leads chronologically backwards to works of Nouveau Réalisme, Informel, Zero and Expressionism.

The 5th floor is dedicated to art from the last 50 years and presents works by Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth, Martin Kippenberger, Anna and Bernhard Blume, installations by Jason Rhoades and Mark Dion as well as photographs and videos by Adrian Paci, Tobias Zielony and Freya Hattenberger.

The vriable space on the 6th floor provides opportunities for temporary exhibitions. The Centre for Cultural Education on the 2nd floor opens with its workshops, media labs and seminar rooms a portal or all generations to all kinds of art. The Hans Breder Intermedia-Archive is another important part of the exhibition. The archive is looked after jointly by the TU Dortmund University and MO and contains videos and scripts from intermedia and art forms specific to their time from the 1960s to the present day.

Since 2005 the MO has followed a concept of the art museum as “power station”. In the spirit of these words, the MO sees itself as a place of cultural memory, in which the artworks are not exhibited as supposedly timetranscending witnesses. Rather it is a place in which artistic and aesthetic, historical, political and social, architectural and urban developmental aspects of the present and the future can be thematized. There are also many and various points of intersection with the other partners in the U.

Link to the website of the MO: www.museumostwall.dortmund.de