The Way We Are 2.0 brings together on 2,500 square metres more than 180 works from more than 100 artists from various times and contexts in a wide-ranging investigation of content and form. Thematic spaces arise from such perspectives as artistic approaches to identity or traditions of landscape, a varied play with everyday life or aspects of urban life, the meaning of coincidence or of the body, minimalist tendencies or social resistance. The exhibition format The Way We Are is designed as a multi-part series, which is brought to life once a year in an extensive variation.

At the end of 2019, some 210 individual works by Norbert Schwontkowski from the Brigitte and Udo Seinsoth Collection were transferred  permanently to the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art. Thanks to this generous gesture, the museum is able to present a permanent artist‘s room dedicated to Norbert Schwontkowski, which supplements major works from the Seinsoth Collection with additional loans and is given a new emphasis once a year.

“NEUSPRÉCH (NEWSPÉAK) is language infested with art, infected. Speaking with art - as art,” say Oliver Ross and Simon Starke, the curators of the exhibition. NEUSPRÉCH takes up a central concept from George Orwell’s novel 1984 in a newly accentuated way and with a view to the resistance in the context of visual art. The artists position themselves against the atrophy of language of a technological compulsion to unify, against marketing speak, pegida speak, art business speak, anti-terror speak, political speak, against the whole range of we/they speak.

Elina Brotherus (*1972 in Helsinki) is internationally known for her self-portraits. And the fact is that she herself may be seen in almost all of her photographic and video works. These include series resembling diaries, photographed landscapes and situational mood-pictures. The exhibition at the Weserburg directs attention to more recent works and groups of works created since 2016. Here the Finnish artist appropriates various contemporary concepts of art and integrates them into her own unmistakeable aesthetic. She thereby follows Arthur Køpcke’s motto: ‘People ask: Why? I ask: Why not?’