A heavenly, hellish celebration

This year, Munich is pulling out all the stops to celebrate Goethe’s legendary work “Faust”. From 23 February to 29 July, over 500 events hosted by some 120 participating institutions – from exhibitions and readings to theatre and dance performances, concerts, discussions, theological debates, lectures, radio and TV programmes and even Faust dinners and shop-window installations – aim to cast the epic drama’s spell over a broad public.

From this amazing selection, BTR singled out two outstanding events of the festival to sample: the exhibitions at the Munich Kunsthalle and the Deutsches Theatermuseum.

The idea for a cross-discipline festival grew from the original project of a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Faust in the Kunsthalle München. To create the exhibition, which now forms the core of the festival, curators Roger Diederen, Nerina Santorius, Thorsten Valk and Sophie Borges enlisted the help of artist and stage designer Philipp Fürhofer. An all-rounder with a scintillating reputation, known also for his musical talent, Fürhofer draws the public right into the drama. Rather than confining them to the role of passive observers, his iconoclastic tour of the multi-faceted exhibition encourages them to explore the dark sides within themselves, while taking them through central points of the drama, seen from literary, artistic and art-historical perspectives.

The Deutsches Theatermuseum München goes one step further with its exhibition “Faust-Welten – Goethes Drama auf der Bühne” (The Worlds of Faust – Goethe’s drama on stage). Curated by Claudia Blank and Katharina Keim, the exhibition evocatively and provocatively plays with the text, presented in a design by Christian Schmidt. This involves projections of the entire work of “Faust I”, totalling 4612 verses, running mesmerizingly in red print on black across the floor, the ceiling, and the left and right walls, luring the public towards it and almost sucking them in. To achieve this effect, the walls were painted red and the interior darkened. The text, in fact white, runs along the red background.