INVITATION TO THE EXHIBITION OPENING

FRIDAY, 7 NOVEMBER 2025, 7 PM

Since the 1960s, the Fluxus movement has been regarded as an experimental laboratory in which art and life are inseparable. Fluxus was based on the idea of “crafting” a better world and the urge to work on rebuilding society after the horrors of World War II

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with the help of music, visual arts, performance, and architecture. Few people know that Bochum also played a role in the Fluxus movement: Inge Baecker (1943-2021) founded a gallery for avant-garde art in Bochum in 1970 and wrote a chapter in art history here. In 2021, she bequeathed her estate to the Kunstmuseum Bochum, including an extraordinary collection of Fluxus art: This is the occasion for the major exhibition HOW WE MET. The exhibition shows artworks and documents from the collection and newly created site-specific structures as walk-in installations, as well as films by Fluxus artists. The result is a lively space that reflects the core of Fluxus: community, transience, humor, and utopia. Accompanying the exhibition HOW WE MET, an extensive, multi-voiced program of events is taking place under the title HOWWEEEEE. Together with artists, schoolchildren, students, associations, and the public in Bochum, HOWWEEEEE catapults Fluxus into the present.

The action program on the ground floor invites visitors to try out sound experiments and Fluxus ideas. Here, the desire to experiment is more important than reverence for the original or fear of failure: “No catastrophes are possible,” said Fluxus artist George Brecht in 1961.