Of tigers, boots and so much more: Mudam's 2025 programme

There's something tantalizing about a museum programme that doesn’t just showcase art but actively confronts the structures shaping how we live, think, and feel. In 2025, Mudam Luxembourg will unveil an intellectually ambitious programme, primarily focusing on the making of art itself. With a line-up spanning ecological art, immersive soundscapes, and retrospectives of pivotal artists, the museum promises to ignite discussions about identity, memory, and the changing role of art in a complex world. The result? A programme that feels simultaneously urgent and timeless: something to truly look forward to.

Exhibitions, Pt. I: spring season

Opening the season is Time & the Tiger, the European debut of Ho Tzu Nyen’s mid-career retrospective. Known for his striking video installations, the Singaporean artist works on Southeast Asian myths in a way that reflects the transformation of the region. Out of it comes a rich array of references that interrogates the way time shapes cultural narratives. At the exhibition’s heart lies T for Time (2023 – ongoing), an algorithmically driven dual projection that juxtaposes cultural anecdotes from Asia and Europe. It suggests that our understanding of time is as much a construct as the stories we tell ourselves.

Lisa Oppenheim’s upcoming Mons. Steichen exhibition doesn’t merely revisit Luxembourgish artist Edward Steichen’s legacy. It rather occupies it, reimagining the frequently overlooked corners of his creative life: his abandoned paintings, his passion for Delphinia, and the textile designs he crafted from everyday objects in the 1920s. Rather than focusing on a single project, Oppenheim demonstrates Steichen’s ability to synthesize and reimagine disciplines, creating new works that dialogue with pieces from Luxembourg’s MNAHA collection. Together, her works and Steichen’s form a layered, kaleidoscopic portrait of "Monsieur Steichen," highlighting the often-overlooked role of women in his art and life.

Equally compelling is Nets for Night and Day, a collaboration between British painter Lubaina Himid and Polish multimedia artist Magda Stawarska that predominantly reflects on migration and journeys. Drawing on over a decade of friendship and dialogue, this immersive exhibition melds painting, poetry, and sound into a dreamlike exploration of memory and personal history. Among others, Himid’s here-reimagined Zanzibar series (1999-2023), with its 9 diptychs, intertwines at surface abstract visuals with Stawarska’s sound pieces, creating an environment that feels at once intimate and expansive.

« Ho Tzu Nyen, ’T for Time: Timepieces’, 2023–en cours. Commande du Singapore Art Museum et du Art Sonje Centre avec le M+, en collaboration avec le Muséum of Contemporary Art Tokyo et la Sharjah Art Foundation » / © Mudam via Roux Magazine / Courtesy of Mudam

Exhibition Pt. II: fall season

The Fall Season will be kicked off by even more female voices: It features a major retrospective of California-based Eleanor Antin, whose work has been at the forefront of feminist and conceptual art for over five decades. The retrospective, curated by Bettina Steinbrügge and Clémentine Proby, revisits iconic works such as 100 Boots, which will be scattered throughout the Grand Hall. Antin’s interdisciplinary practice – spanning photography, performance, and film – intricately engages with body politics and the questioning of gender norms, as she documents primarily her own body’s evolution and representation throughout time and space.

Mudam’s commitment to interdisciplinarity does not stop here, though; it particularly manifests itself in A Comparative Dialogue Act, a collaboration between Luxembourgian artist Andrea Mancini and the design collective Every Island. Originally presented at the Venice Biennale (2024), the here-reactivated exhibition transforms space into an immersive experiment where sound and performance collide. Altogether, the project aims to treat the exhibition hall as a site of production and negotiation: walls and floors are repurposed as sonic instruments.

« Vue de l’exposition, Pavillon du Luxembourg, ‘A Comparative Dialogue Act’. Biennale Arte 2024 @ Delfino Sisto Legnani – Dsl Studio 2024 » / © Mudam via Roux Magazine / Courtesy of Mudam

Reimagining urban spaces and futures with LUGA

What particularly intrigued me about the programme, though, is that Mudam has committed to a fruitful partnership with LUGA (Luxembourg Urban Garden) to transform Luxembourg’s public spaces through two monographic projects.

On the one hand, Hungarian-American artist Agnes Denes, a forerunner in ecological and environmental art, brings her monumental The Living Pyramid (2015) to the Park Dräi Eechelen. The pyramid combines over 2000 local plant species in a nine-meter-high structure that evolves over the course of the exhibition. This project goes beyond mere aesthetics: prior to the finalisation of the installation, Mudam invites participants to reflect on the future through a participatory time capsule project. Visitors contribute written responses about the meaning of life, which will be buried alongside the pyramid and unearthed a thousand years from now. This may be quite an ambitious and optimistic endeavour, but it’s above all else a quiet yet profound gesture, linking ephemeral human concerns with the endurance of nature and art.

On the other hand, Scottish artist Susan Philipsz transforms the 900-meter-long Aquatunnel beneath Luxembourg City into an auditory experience with The Lower World. Her installation blends the eerie tones of civil defense sirens with Melusina’s mythical siren calls, crafting a soundscape that flows in waves of dissonance and melody. The work asks visitors to reconsider their relationship to the spaces they occupy and the emotions these spaces evoke.

« Agnes Denes, ‘The Living Pyramid’, 2015. Documenta 14, Cassel, Allemagne @ Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects. Photo: Matthias Voeltzke » / © Mudam via Roux Magazine / Courtesy of Mudam

Moving back inside: additions to the Mudam collection

To turn the gaze back inward: From April 2025 onward, Mudam’s collection will include exciting new additions. Pieces by artists such as Monika Sosnowska (Stairway, 2010), Zoe Leonard (Untitled, 2001), and Eva Kot’átková (Controlled Memory Loss, 2009–2010) reveal the tactile traces of history embedded in found objects and handcrafted techniques. Sosnowska’s towering staircase sculpture, for example, reinterprets industrial materials through an emotional lens, suggesting that even the most rigid structures can hold vulnerability.

To further add to that idea, Fiona Banner (aka The Vanity Press) transforms the destructive into the reflective with Nude Wing (2011), a monumental sculpture crafted from the wing of a Tornado fighter jet. To be installed in Mudam’s Grand Hall, it will exist in visual dialogue with Ieoh Ming Pei’s architecture, its surface shifting with the changing light. In its towering, ambiguous stillness, Nude Wing aims to force us to confront the contradiction between what we see and what we feel.

Finally, Tiffany Sia, winner of the 2024 Baloise Art Prize, delves into the materiality of moving images and their influence on spatial perception in The Sojourn (2023). Tracing the legacy of martial arts filmmaker King Hu, Sia ventures into Taiwan’s Hehuanshan mountains, where Hu sought to recreate the landscapes of his native China. Blurring the lines between memory, nostalgia, and distortion, Sia offers a meditative study of what is lost – and reshaped – in translation.

And finally, for fans of Mudam's performance events

In a collaboration with Mexico City’s TONO Festival, performance art takes centre stage during the Luxembourg Museum Days on May 17 and 18 with Fountain of Poetry, a dynamic new piece by Mexican artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane. Known for her multidisciplinary practice, Sánchez-Kane blurs the lines between fashion, sculpture, and performance.

Her latest work incorporates elements of Mexican culture – specifically the communal act of sharing Mexican horchata drinks – to explore themes of domination, pleasure, and solidarity. The performance invites poets, musicians, and dancers to collaborate in real-time, creating a space that is as much about collective creation as it is about individual expression.

Roux Magazine

Roux Magazine is made by students at the University of Luxembourg. We love their work, so we decided to team up with them and bring some of their articles to our audience as well. You can find all of their issues on Issuu.