Since 2020, the ifa Galleries in Berlin and Stuttgart have been cultivating encounters of dialogue among individual artistic positions and international contemporary artists.

Out of the Box adopts a practice of reexamining individual works, which become part of an artistic/curatorial revision. This began with the exhibition Time Goes By featuring Rebecca Horn and Antonio Paucar. In 2021, this first show was followed by A Natural Order of Things with Lothar Baumgarten and Gabriel Rossell Santillán at ifa Gallery Stuttgart and Notes of a Seeress, which featured works by Joseph Beuys in dialogue with Andrea Acosta, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, and Sara Ouhaddou at ifa Gallery Berlin.

In 2022, the Berlin gallery continued the series with the exhibitions Spheres of Interest*  and Chains of Interest.

ifa’s art collection

For six decades, ifa has cultivated worldwide connections from Stuttgart through the exhibition medium. The works it has acquired since the 1970s from the domains of art and design comprise the cornerstone of this exceptional collection. In 1991, in the course of German Reunification, a part of the collection of East Germany’s Center for Art Exhibitions was merged with ifa’s West German art collection.

The history of the ifa art collection is closely linked with the concept of ifa touring exhibitions. Curators are invited to develop monographic exhibitions that present remarkable artistic positions from Germany. Another focus lies on socially relevant exhibitions projects that reflect contemporary artistic tendencies and currents from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As touring exhibitions, these are shown at international museums and cultural institutions, but also outside major metropolises. Currently, artworks are on display in 20 different exhibitions around the world, which have also been co-creatively conceived since the 2010s. A number of other works in the collection are on loan to museums.

What stories can these well-traveled artworks tell us? What have the works witnessed? Whom have they encountered worldwide?

ifa Agora: Network, Collection, Archive. Art

The ifa agora is the central platform for the network, collection and archive of ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) in the field of art. It is a place of transcultural exchange – just as the agora in ancient Greece was a city’s most important meeting place and marketplace. It shows ifa’s relationships and brings them together online.