Annual programme 2024

30 years as UNESCO World Heritage Site
Annual programme for 2024

Until 28 April 2024
JENS HARDER. THE STORY OF PLANET A
14 billion years of earth history in a comic

From the Big Bang to the distant future: Jens Harder tells the story of our planet in an impressive comic trilogy. The result is a veritable encyclopaedia of the Earth. None of the pictures is invented: Jens Harder found them over years of research, and then put them together in a gigantic picture mosaic. His award-winning pictorial history can now be experienced, for the first time in Germany and Europe, as a complete exhibition at the Völklinger Hütte World Heritage Site, until the 28th of April 2024.

Until 18 August 2024
GERMAN CINEMA
1895 to the present day
Blower hall and compressor station

What has never been done before, now becomes reality: the historic blower hall of the Völklinger Hütte World Cultural Heritage Site with its flywheels of history, inspires both the media and the audience as an equally significant and auratic venue for the largest comprehensive exhibition of German film to date. The multimedia show spans from the legendary “Wintergarten” programme by the Skladanowsky brothers on 1 November 1895 in Berlin through early silent film and sound film to current formats and film productions from 2023.

About 100 large screens and 30 monitors as well as about 350 exhibits, invite you to wander through a unique film landscape that achieved world renown with the expressionism and cinema of the Weimar Republic and reflects Germany’s culture and history like no other medium. 128 years of German film history are condensed into a veritable cultural and contemporary portrait of Germany in the 20th and 21st centuries – including numerous references to worldwide film-making.

An exhibition of the Völklinger Hütte World Heritage Site in co-operation with the Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin

 
28 April 2024–10 November 2024
The 7th URBAN ART BIENNALE
Burden shed, sintering plant and outdoor area

Press conference: Thursday, 25 April 2024, 11.00 a.m.
Opening: Sunday, 28 April 2024, 3.00 p.m.

The URBAN ART BIENNALE at the Völklinger Hütte World Heritage Site is one of the world’s largest exhibitions of this anarchic form of art beyond conventional white cube aesthetics. The entire area of the Völklingen Ironworks enters into dialogue with an art form that has evolved from street art and graffiti. Established in 2011, the 2024 show will focus on participatory urban art projects as well as political works in situ. For the first time, the burner platform on the top floor of the sintering plant will also be included in the extensive circuit.

In cooperation with Constellations de Metz, Le Mur, Luxembourg and the cities of Nancy, Verviers and Liège as part of the INTERREG project GRACE.

1 June 2024–1 September 2024
MAN & MINING
Global extraction and its impact on people and nature
Ore shed

Opening: Friday, 31 May 2024, 7.00 p.m.

In the light of the world’s rapidly growing population and expanding consumption, the need to extract raw materials poses ever-greater ecological, economic, political and social problems on a global scale. In particular, unsustainable mining practices and the exploitation of ecological systems and local communities come with enormous environmental and social costs that burden current and future generations. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly difficult to meet the global demand for raw materials. For example, a whole variety of metals are now needed to effect the transition to sustainable forms of energy with the help of renewable power.

The exhibition MAN & MINING at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Völklingen Ironworks explores the human factor in the extraction of raw materials and the mining business – the human resources that first enable the industrial appropriation of land above and below ground. Whether the continued mining of iron ore and coal, which gave rise to the former Völklingen Ironworks, or the extraction of gold, silver, manganese or lithium, which are vital for electromobility and electronic devices such as tablets and smartphones – the exhibition firmly adopts the perspective of the people involved in, and impacted by, the extraction of raw materials.

MAN & MINING brings together photographs, found art and installation artworks from Unknown Fields (AU/UK), Danny Franzreb (AT), Johnny Haglund (NO), Pieter Hugo (ZA), Lu Guang (CN), Andrea Mancini (LU), Lisa Rave (DE), Sebastião Salgado (BR) and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer (PR) in an exhibition landscape specially designed for the Ore shed.

An exhibition of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Völklingen Ironworks, in cooperation with the Museum of Work in Hamburg (inaugural exhibition location: 17.11.2023–1.05.2024).

2 June 2024
UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE DAY
30 years as UNESCO World Heritage Site
Ore yard

As the highlight of the 30th anniversary of being named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Völklingen Ironworks will host the principal event to mark the 2024 UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE DAY in Germany. Guests from throughout Germany will gather in Saarland to celebrate the UNESCO world heritage idea.

In cooperation with the German Commission for UNESCO, Bonn.

2–13 October 2024
FREISTIL FESTIVAL
Ore shed

Featuring performers from throughout the SaarLorLux region as well as Germany, the FREISTIL FESTIVAL provides a showcase for Saarland’s independent performing arts scene and is now a firm fixture in the ore shed calendar at the Völklinger Hütte World Heritage Site. A new addition this year is the German-wide Kinder-Theater-Fest, which will celebrate the opening of its 10th edition on 10 October as part of the FREISTIL Festival.

9 November 2024–17 August 2025
THE TRUE SIZE OF AFRICA
Transcontinental perspectives
Blower hall and compressor station

Press conference: Thursday, 7 November 2024, 11.00 a.m.
Opening ceremony and party: Friday, 8 November 2024, 6.30 p.m.

“Here lies, God rest, my dear N***, Chim Bebe, deceased 1912 at the age of 26 years.” This epitaph on the gravestone of a man born in the West African colony of Togo at the old cemetery in Saarlouis illustrates just how close Africa is to Germany, even here in Saarland. Although North Africa already served as the breadbasket to the Roman Empire, the size of the African continent as a whole has been systematically under-represented on world maps since the time of Mercator. To this day, its geographical scale and global historical significance have been underestimated, despite its prehistoric role as the cradle of humanity. In his book Africa Is Not a Country, Dipo Faloyin writes that the key thing to remember about Africa is that it is a continent made up of 54 culturally and geographically diverse countries.
THE TRUE SIZE OF AFRICA looks to take a different artistic and cultural approach to this huge continent through continual shifts of perspective and a multitude of curatorial voices. A “museum of memorability” would reflect on Africa’s past and present from the perspective of Europe as a colonial power; here, by contrast, artists from DR Congo and Namibia cast their gaze on private European collections of African sculptures and objects and curate them between the machines and flywheels of the blower hall. Their guiding principle is to reverse the traditional perspective – here, Europe’s dark industrial modernity now meets the diverse, luminous culture of Africa. Major artworks from recent decades are paired with sound and spatial installations created especially for the exhibition. This creates a dense network of impressions and modes of perception that, ideally, enables a sustained and multi-layered encounter with THE TRUE SIZE OF AFRICA in its past, present and future.
Invited artists include Kader Attia (Berlin, Germany / Algiers, Algeria), Memory Biwa (Windhoek, Namibia), Kaloki Nyamai (Nairobi, Kenya), Emeka Ogboh (Berlin, Germany / Lagos, Nigeria), Zineb Sedira (Paris, France / London, UK / Algiers, Algeria) und Géraldine Tobe (Kinshasa, DR Congo).

In cooperation with the Käte Hamburger Research Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE) at Saarland University, Saarbrücken.

Exhibitions and in-situ installations that can be experienced all year round

Until 28 September 2025
RÉMY MARKOWITSCH
WE ALL (Except the Others)
Suspension railway workshop
The contamination of nature and culture; forced labour, then and now; Hermann Röchling and his legacy – Swiss artist Rémy Markowitsch’s multimedia installation WE ALL (Except the Others), on show in the historic suspension railway workshop, illuminates and condenses key themes and significant places in the history of the Völklingen Ironworks.

Until 27 August 2028
MOTION POWERS HISTORY
Second floor of the water tower
The Völklingen Ironworks was once a throbbing powerhouse: day after day, workers poured in and out with each new shift; raw materials and other supplies were constantly arriving at the ironworks; iron and steel were dispatched in all directions. The exhibition MOTION POWERS HISTORY on the second floor of the water tower provides hitherto unseen perspectives on the movement of raw materials, people and products that was so vital to the history of the Völklingen Ironworks.

CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI. THE FORCED LABOURERS
Place of commemoration at the Völklingen Ironworks
Sintering plant
Boltanski’s installation from 2018 creates a memorial site for all the people who had to perform forced labour at the Völklingen Ironworks during the First and Second World Wars. An unsettling work of art that helps keep their memory alive.

CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI. MEMORIES
In memory of the workers at the Völklingen Ironworks
Burden shed
Boltanski’s 2020 installation comprises an assemblage of workers’ lockers from various parts of the ironworks. Resonating from these lockers are the voices of former workers, who recount their memories of the ironworks, thereby offering an intimate experience of their daily work and lives.