KONNTEICHSEIN - Miriam Cahn

Miriam Cahn was born in Basel in 1949. As a student at the Gewerbeschule in Basel from 1968 to 1973, she became involved in the feminist and anti-nuclear movements. This period laid the foundations for her work, which she envisages as a site of individual resistance and dissent and a means of denouncing forms of humiliation and violence. Over the course of three decades, her work has become an echo chamber for contemporary conflicts and their media coverage, from the Gulf War to the Balkan War in the 1990s to the geopolitical shifts that followed the “Arab Spring” and to the ongoing crises that have forced hundreds of thousands of people from the Middle East and Africa to migrate since the beginning of the 2000s. Today, her work offers a response full of rage to the war in Ukraine and the selective treatment of refugees at Europe’s borders.

Significant solo exhibitions include Ma pensée sérielle, Cahn’s first major retrospective in a French institution at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2023); GEZEICHNET at ICA Milan (2022); ME AS HAPPENING shown at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg first (2020) and in a new iteration at The Power Plant, Toronto (2021); Fremd das fremde at Palazzo Castelmur (Stampa, 2021); Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing (2020); the exhibition I AS HUMAN at Kunstmuseum Bern (2019) which travelled to Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019) and Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2019); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2019), among others. In 2022 the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen awarded her the Rubenspreis of the city of Siegen which was accompanied by her solo exhibition MEINEJUDEN. In October 2024 her solo exhibition READING DUST opens at Stedelijk, Amsterdam.

She has been the recipient of notable awards including the 14th Rubens Prize from the city of Siegen (2022), Oberrheinischer Kunstpreis Offenburg, Basler Kunstpreis, Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis Berlin, Ströher Preis Frankfurt/Main and the DAAD grant in 1985.

Her works are included in renowned collections such as Pinault Collection (Paris), Kunstmuseum Basel, Tate Modern (London), Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), Museum for Modern Art (Warsaw), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Rubell Collection (Miami), Long Museum (Shanghai) and Osaka Museum.