The digital exhibition “Access to curatorial networks – Postcards by Kasper König” makes the selection of collaged cards – which were exhibited as part of ‘case study #1’ from 26 May to 22 June 2025 in the library foyer of the Philosophikum – now also available online. These cards were sent by Kasper König (1943–2024), curator, co-founder and long-time artistic director of Skulptur Projekte Münster and director of the Museum Ludwig, over the course of decades to artists, colleagues and companions.
These personal messages, full of wit and with a clearly recognisable style, are gestures of appreciation and a unique testimony to his curatorial practice. Many of the people he worked with in the art world have their own collections of these cards.
In the digital exhibition view, you can not only flip the cards by simply clicking on them; transcriptions and a full-screen mode—which allows you to circle through and view each card in detail from different angles—are also accessible via the buttons superimposed on each card.
Exhibition text
In their interweaving of image and text, the postcards oscillate between a very specific contextual reference and an openness of meaning. König brought together material from the art world, advertising and everyday culture on the standardised format. Cut-up museum postcards, newspaper clippings, advertising material, photographs and glitter stickers condense into historical testimonies. The duality of front and back dissolves into a provisional whole. This disregard for aesthetic conventions reveals a connection to mail art and artistic familiarity. The informal communication system that becomes visible when the postcards are viewed together reveals everyday practices of curatorial communication as well as biographical traces or performative gestures of revealing secrets that can be glimpsed in the handwritten messages – often enigmatic and informal, sometimes indiscreet, always personal and sometimes barely decipherable.
As testimonies to the networks on which curatorial practices are based, the cards refer to biographical traces and hint at relationships and personal and professional constellations. At the same time, in their materiality, these fragmentary messages stand for the nostalgia associated with media change with regard to outdated formats of the ephemeral. The postcards on display come from collections belonging to Nils Emmerich (art historian and curator, Berlin), Ursula Frohne (co-director of the Centre for Advanced Study, Institute of Art History, University of Münster), Dorothea Schöne (artistic director of the Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin), Lisa Marei Schmidt (director of the Brücke Museum, Berlin) and Marianne Wagner (curator of contemporary art at the LWL Museum of Art and Culture, Münster). We would like to express our sincere thanks to all lenders.