Media Collection Hamburger Kunsthalle

The Hamburger Kunsthalle has an outstanding media collection which offers a wide-ranging overview of the history of media art based on over 600 videos, films, video installations, record albums, audio cassettes and CDs spanning the period from 1960 to today. The focus of the collection, which was founded in 1977 and has been greatly expanded since 1993, is primarily on video installations, including ground-breaking works by artists such as Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Tracey Emin, Valie Export, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Shirin Neshat or Ulrike Rosenbach. In recent years the collection has added important works by younger artists including Thorsten Brinkmann, Vajiko Chackhiani, Clemens von Wedemeyer and Tobias Zielony, who link in their own individual ways issues of history, place and identity.
Borrowing its title from Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 publication »The Medium Is the Message«, the Hamburger Kunsthalle showed in 2018 with the exhibition »The Video Is the Message« a first comprehensive overview of the media collection.
The aim is to present the complete collection online in the near future. We will give you a first insight with the works of Christian Jankowski, Bjørn Melhus, Thorsten Brinkmann und Till Krause.
The catalogue for the collection published in 2008 can be purchased in the bookshop and online for € 9.90 (with DVD).