The exhibition “moving is in every direction. Environments – Installations – Narrative Spaces” traces the history of installation art from the 1960s until today with a focus on narrative structures. As the visitors move through the exhibition, they explore expansive walk-in environments, video and sound installations, as well as cross-media works especially developed for the exhibition. The non-linear narrative structure, put forth by Gertrude Stein, to which the exhibition title relates, serves as a starting point for exploring sculptural arrangements, image sequences, or spatially staged narratives. Within the approximately 3,500 square metres of exhibition space, there are installations by Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Isa Genzken/Wolfgang Tillmans, Bruce Nauman, Susan Philipsz, Pipilotti Rist, Bunny Rogers, Gregor Schneider, Thomas Schütte, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, and Wolf Vostell.

The exhibition moves historically from the ‘environments’ introduced by Allan Kaprow in 1958, through Dan Flavin’s ‘situations’ or Wolf Vostell’s ‘spaces’ of the 1960s and 1970s up to the ‘installation art’, established in the 1980s. This term has remained in use up until the present. ‘Installation’ stands for art works covering an entire room. Moreover, the youngest generation of artists connects physical and virtual space. As ‘narrative spaces’, the current endeavours in installation art present themselves as utopian ideas for our collective life as a society.

“moving is in every direction. Environments – Installations – Narrative Spaces” shows works from the collection of the Nationalgalerie, the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection at Hamburger Bahnhof, the Marx collection, the Haubrok Foundation, and selected loans. Alongside the temporary exhibition, permanently installed works by Dan Flavin, Joseph Beuys, Robert Kusmirowski, and Bruce Nauman also form part of the exhibition, as well as a room by Gregor Schneider in the west wing of the ground floor, which has been made accessible once again for this occasion.