Incarnate

This exhibition brings together two of North Rhine-Westphalia’s leading private art institutions—placing video art from the Julia Stoschek Collection into dialogue with classic Japanese and Asian art from the Viktor and Marianne Langen collection.

Incarnate invites viewers to explore a continuum between material and immaterial worlds, and to discover   surprising overlaps between spiritual inquiry and media aesthetics. While staging encounters between devotional art and onscreen figures the exhibition challenges distinctions between ancient and contemporary insight.

Throughout, the gallery presentations establish an affinity between the metaphysical concerns of Buddhism and the mirror games of video art: specifically, the former’s distrust of appearance, privileging a deeper reality, and the latter’s ambivalent view of the screen as a window/veil. The artwork selection was also inspired by the passage of the word ‘avatar’ from ancient Eastern thought into today’s digital culture. 

In philosophy and theology, ‘incarnation’ names the presence of spirit within a physical form. But what does this look like? Incarnate’s encounters between classic, modern, and contemporary artworks showcase a recursive loop between form/mediation and content, well-described in a passage from the Heart Sūtra of Mahāyāna Buddhism: “Form is emptiness (śūnyatā), emptiness is form”. Traversing time and geography, the featured pieces ask you to reflect upon the ‘truth’ of illusion; how form and emptiness, body and spirit, surface and depth, old and new, are more connected than might first appear.