Media Collection

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, Dara Birnbaum, Tracey Emin, Valie Export, Rebecca Horn, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman or Ulrike Rosenbach. In recent years the collection has added important works by artists including Francis Alÿs, Rosa Barba, Thorsten Brinkmann, Dora Garcia, Clemens von Wedemeyer and Tobias Zielony.

Borrowing its title from Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 publication, the Hamburger Kunsthalle showed in 2018 with the exhibition »The Video Is the Message« a first comprehensive overview of the media collection.
The presentation of a selection of the media collection will be online in a near future.