Haegue Yang is the new chair of Kunst-Werke Berlin, the institution responsible for the KW Institute for Contemporary Art and the Berlin Biennale. The South Korean artist succeeds the four year tenure of Katharina Grosse.
Yang inherits an organisation facing numerous challenges: earlier this year the city of Berlin cut its culture spend by €130 million, which saw KW loose 10–12 percent of its budget, as well as a city-funded staff position. The Mitte arts space consequently mothballed parts of its mediation programme and cancelled a number of partnerships.
The chair of the board position will also bring Yang into the frontline of Germany’s virulent culture wars, with pro-Palestinian positions regarded as controversial. Consequently, as Martin Herbert recently pointed out in his review of the current Berlin Biennale, ‘German art institutions are deafeningly, horrifically silent on the matter’, resulting in an exhibition in which ‘a viewer is invited to think about almost everywhere but Gaza’. A number of artists have vowed to boycott Berlin arts organisations as a consequence.
Yang lives and works in Berlin and Seoul and teaches at Staedelschule, her alma mater. In 2018, Yang won the Wolfgang Hahn Prize at Ludwig Museum in Cologne.
