Bavaria, Germany
After completing her studies in Art History, Philosophy, and Curatorial Practice in Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, and Bern, Franziska Stöhr authored her PhD thesis "endlos," the first comprehensive publication on the history of film and video loops in the interplay of technology, art, and exhibition history. She has been working as a curator and lecturer since. Franziska Stöhr has taught at the University of Television and Film Munich, the Karlsruhe University of Art and Design, and the University of Freiburg. Exhibitions co-curated by her include "Creating Realities. Encounters Between Art and Cinema" at the Pinakothek der Moderne, "Archaeology of the Future. Art and Games" at the State Museum of Egyptian Art (both 2015 as part of Kino der Kunst in Munich), "Pop Pictures People" at the Museum Brandhorst (2017), "Thrill of Deception. From Ancient Art to Virtual Reality" at Kunsthalle München (2018), and "Hermann Glöckner—A Master of Modernism" at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München (2019). Franziska Stöhr furthermore curated the video art presentations "Im Blick" (2017), "Inversed World" (2018), "Dance Images" (2019), and the interdisciplinary exhibition "What If ...? On the Utopian in Art, Architecture, and Design" (2020) at the Neues Museum Nürnberg. In July 2020 she took up her position as a curator at the Kunsthalle München. There, she curated exhibitions like "Flowers Forever. Flowers in Art and Culture" (2023) as well as "Viktor&Rolf. Fashion Statements" (2024, in collaboration with Thierry-Maxime Loriot), as well as „Digital by Nature. The Art of Miguel Chevalier" (2025), which are currently all international travelling exhibitions.
How do we want to live today and what artistic means can help us find productive approaches to do so? The interdisciplinary exhibition on the utopian engages contemporary perspectives from art, architecture, and design in a dialog with references from the 1960s and 1970s. It takes up contemporary calls for new utopias for the 21st century and aims at initiating social discussions and visions of the future not by means of dystopian prophecies, but by promoting new modes of thinking via productive discourse. If one perceives utopia as a method of thinking, as an intellectual free space in which concepts for the future are tested while also critically reflecting the status quo, independent of what is currently realizable, it gains immediate significance for the present. As creative engines, art, architecture, and design can make a meaningful contribution to promoting such alternative models of thought and reassessing utopian qualities. What If ...? presents over thirty artists and designers who investigate the potential of the utopian. In five chapters, the exhibition features photographs, films and videos, drawings, architectural models and objects, extensive or interactive installations. Central thematic complexes related to the utopian, such as state and city, bring together historical and current sources of inspiration for a new understanding. Furthermore, the relationship between individual and social utopias as well as alternative perspectives on how we deal with nature and technologies are discussed. The power of imagination and the chances these visualizations offer for our discourses illustrate the relevance of art and design when it comes to developing new utopias.
2019 Dance Images. Film and Video Works by Nevin Aladağ, Nam June Paik, Ulrike Rosenbach, Miranda Pennell and Paul Maheke 2018 Inverted World. Video Works by AES+F, Till Nowak, Yang Fudong and Almagul Menlibayeva