Heimaten

An exhibition and survey

The German word Heimat can mean both home and homeland. But what is that, exactly? Is Heimat a place? Can you smell, touch or even taste Heimat? Can there even be that one distinctive Heimat at all?

HEIMATEN. An exhibition and survey is an attempt to break with conventional takes on Heimat. Few terms are as emotionally charged, as susceptible to political and commercial exploitation, as sentimentally loaded and subjective. There is no one definition of Heimat that everyone can agree on.

Based on this assumption we will not define Heimat once and for all (and for everybody). This is why the exhibition’s title bears the unfamiliar plural HEIMATEN. Instead of answers, we have questions: Our exhibits provide food for thought along seven central themes: Is your Heimat a place or is it a community? Is your Heimat sensory or is it a nation? Is your Heimat a cause for concern or do you associate it with loss? How do you build a new Heimat for yourself? These questions will most certainly cause debate and we welcome our visitors to contradict our views.

We conceive of Heimat as place, but also as a multi-faceted and fluid concept. Heimat is never just there, but is brought into being anew every day. One goal of this exhibition is to celebrate this constant change and complexity through the objects on display and through personal stories.

As an Open-Air Museum, Molfsee also playfully questions common expectations of the “Heimatmuseum” through this show. It includes music videos, videogames, art installations, graphic design, garments and much more. Among the Art shown are Markus Wende’s famous picture puzzles, a projection of Susanne Kutter’s “Die Zuckerdose”, the cinematic collage “Silberwald” by Christoph Girardet and an installation on Angela Merkel’s iconic sentence “Wir schaffen das” by Cream on Chrome.

You can also become part of the exhibition yourself by sharing your notions of Heimat through our smartphone-enabled survey.

This exhibition has been conceived of at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G) and was shown there from 2021 to 2022. We have amended it and have added selected exhibits from our collections at Molfsee for its presentation at the Jahr100Haus.