The 6th edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster will take place from 13 June to 3 October 2027. Returning to the city every ten years since its founding in 1977, the coming edition marks the 50th anniversary of the exhibition. Initiated by Klaus Bußmann and Kasper König, Skulptur Projekte redefined art in the public space and has established a deep and lasting engagement with the social fabric of Münster. The next iteration will be directed by the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom / WHW and hosted by the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe (LWL) and the City of Münster. The exhibition is organized by the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur.

Skulptur Projekte Münster 2027 takes the social, cultural, and political changes, urgencies, and episodes that have marked the past decade as its starting points. From here, it will look forward and outward in time and space, responding to a city and world that stand at a major inflection point. The new edition asks us to listen and learn from a particular place and time, while always considering how they connect and resonate with many other elsewheres. At its core, Skulptur Projekte 2027 affirms art’s poetic, philosophical, and world-making power.

What, How & for Whom / WHW is a curatorial collective formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb and Berlin. Its members are Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović. WHW curated the programme of the city-owned Galerija Nova in Zagreb from 2003 to 2023 and will begin directing a new exhibition space in the city in 2026. In 2018, the collective established an international study programme for emerging artists in Zagreb, WHW Akademija.

From 2019 to 2024, three members of the collective, Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović, served as artistic directors of Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, and, in 2024, were announced as artistic directors of Skulptur Projekte Münster 2027.

Over the years, WHW has organized production, exhibition, education, and publishing projects in various geographical and cultural contexts and on different institutional scales. Combining curatorial practice with historical research as well as discursive and educational formats, the collective’s work is guided by the conviction that art plays a central role in collectively questioning and reshaping ways of thinking and acting in society.

Starting in the spring of 2026, Skulptur Projekte is hosting a series of events offering an opportunity to engage with the themes that will shape the 2027 exhibition. On Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 6 pm, Skulptur Projekte will join B-Side, a self-organized space in Münster, for an evening with What, How & for Whom / WHW. The artistic directors of Skulptur Projekte 2027 will share insights into their practice, after which visitors are invited to stay for a communal dinner and DJ sets by local musicians, opening up space for encounters and conversations.

As part of the Münster Lecture series organized by the University of the Arts Münster, Skulptur Projekte will host a lecture on Tuesday, 7 July 2026 at 6 pm. Both dates are part of a broader programme leading up to the exhibition in the summer of 2027.

50 Years of Skulptur Projekte Münster

Since Klaus Bußmann and Kasper König organized the first exhibition in 1977, Skulptur Projekte Münster has made a fundamental contribution to the development of public art. Every ten years, contemporary artists are invited to explore a broad variety of public spaces in Münster through new commissions. A look at past exhibitions shows how each edition was shaped by current developments in art, society, contemporary history, and the nature of the sites. This unique approach is reflected in the public collection of around forty-five works in the urban space. It is also documented in the Skulptur Projekte Archives, which have been an integral part of the contemporary art collection at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur since 2017. The archive’s website allows visitors to take a tour of past editions.