Program

MNHA

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  Musée national d’histoire et d’art

  Workshop for Kids: Magnets in Gast Michels’ style

  17H00 – 21H00

  Get inspired by Gast Michels’ playful colours and patterns and create your own little magnetic works of art to take home as souvenirs.

   

   

   

   

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  Musée national d’histoire et d’art

  Theatre Tour: "Mansfeld um Tour"

  19H00 & 20H00 (LU)

  The character of Pierre Ernest de Mansfeld, governor of Luxembourg in the 16th century, leads visitors through the museum's collection and invites them to time travel with him.

   

   

   

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  Musée national d’histoire et d’art

  Musical performance: Ro Gebhardt's "International"

  19H30 | 20H30 | 21H30 | 22h30

  After NYC, Berlin and Paris, Ro Gebhardt, a well-known German jazz guitarist, will perform with his quartet "International" at the MNHA. Featuring Ro Gebhardt on guitar, Alec Gebhardt on bass, Jeff Herr on drums and Armindo Ribeiro on piano, the band will provide lively entertainment throughout the evening.

  As a successful musician with a long track record (Blue Note in New York, Central Park Jazzfest NYC, Duc de Lombard in Paris, Aquarium in Warsaw or A-Trane in Berlin) and one that’s in demand (teaching at colleges and universities such as the Harbor Conservatory for the Performing Arts in New York, Malta, Mainz, Cologne or Würzburg), Ro is probably one of the most sought-after jazz musicians in Germany and Europe. "International" is the result of 40 years of experience on stage.

  Best known for his big band sound, funk and soul projects with or without vocals and his solo concerts, Ro Gebhardt will perform with an international quartet this time and play the greatest Brazilian and Latin and some of his own songs from his latest CD "Fruit Of Passion", produced by SR in Berlin.

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  Musée national d’histoire et d’art

  "Coup de cœur" with Gina Árvai (Spoken Word Performance)

  21H00 (EN) | 23H00 (EN)

  For Gina Árvai, writing has long been a means to put into words her experiences as a child of immigrant parents. She began her career by performing her own texts at poetry slam events. In 2016, she won the Prix Laurence, a literature prize for young contemporary poetry.

  Since this key experience, she has been working relentlessly on developing her performances, in which she essentially explores the concept of ‘bad taste’ in spoken word. In spring 2022, she was invited to perform on the picturesque Place Saint-Sulpice in the heart of Paris as part of the prestigious festival Printemps des poètes. Gina, who refers to herself as a word mechanic, speaks and writes in Luxembourgish, French, German, English, Hungarian and Italian.

   

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  Musée national d’histoire et d’art

  Guided tours of the exhibition "Gast Michels (1954-2013). Movement in colour, form and symbols"

  17H30 (FR) | 19H30 (EN) | 22H00 (LU/DE)

  The Luxembourgish artist Gast Michels (1954-2013) was a remarkably keen observer of his environment. He meticulously analysed and decoded his surroundings, translating them into his own formal universe. Michels’ oeuvre has a unique formal language and features recurring symbols like wheels or arrows and a luminous colour palette, often dominated by the complementary colours blue and yellow.

  While the early work of the Echternach-born artist predominantly deals with seemingly mythical depictions of human figures in woodland settings, his later works have a more graphic pictorial language featuring highly stylised objects and signs. As a painter, sculptor and graphic artist, Michels worked in various mediums but always remained true to his expressive, symbolic and at times humorous and ironic visual language.

  This autumn, the Cercle Cité and the National Museum of History and Art present the artist‘s first comprehensive retrospective, covering 30 years of his work. The show consists of two parts and is on show at both exhibition venues. The first part at the Cercle Cité focuses on Michels’ works on paper, illustrating his semiotic approach to developing a unique language of forms and symbols. The second part at the MNHA concentrates on the artist’s monumental works. It provides an overview of Michels’ different creative phases and the development of his distinctive style with works ranging from the early 1980s to the 2010s, including paintings, sculptures and a tapestry.

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  Musée national d’histoire et d’art

  Guided tours of the exhibition "Luxembourg’s colonial past"

  18H00 (FR) | 20H30 (EN) | 21H30 (LU)

  Does Luxembourg have a colonial past? Surely, many Luxembourgers would answer this question with a resounding no, as their country was never a colonial power. But is it really that simple? The National Museum of History and Art (MNHA) decided to look into this question. In Luxembourg, too, the ideology of colonialism, which was based on the principle of inequality between the Europeans and the colonised, shaped the way society thought as well as politics, economy and culture from the mid-19th century through to the 1960s. People started rejecting this discriminative racial ideology from the mid-20th century, which from today’s point of view lacks any scientific basis whatsoever.

  Although the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg never exercised political authority over any foreign territories or their populations, many Luxembourgers left to live and work in the colonies of other European states in the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, almost 600 people from the Grand Duchy were living in Belgian Congo not long before the Democratic Republic of Congo gained its independence in 1960.

  Men and women from Luxembourg were involved in the conquest, exploitation and evangelisation of various colonies, and in the economic exploitation of Belgian Congo and the cruel oppression of its people under the rule of Belgian King Leopold II (1885-1908), which has gone down in history as the Congo atrocities or Red Rubber. The temporary exhibition provides an overview of Luxembourg’s little-known colonial past. By presenting historical facts and the lives of individual people, the MNHA illustrates the complexity of colonial relations that continue to resonate today.

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  Musée national d’histoire et d’art

  Guided tours of the exhibition "The Rape of Europe. In solidarity with Ukraine"

  18H30 (FR) | 22H30 (LU) | 23H30 (EN)

  Since 24 February 2022, Russia’s aggression and war against the Ukrainian people have taken us back to the darkest times in European history; tens of thousands dead, cities partially razed to the ground and millions of Ukrainian refugees wandering across Europe. As a museum, how can we react and show a sign of solidarity with those under attack when direct cooperation with a Ukrainian museum is proving impossible at the moment and when our own collection has barely any objects relating to Ukraine? By pure coincidence, the MNHA was already in contact with the Russian-born artist Maxim Kantor, well known for his extremely critical attitude towards the Putin regime and recent developments in Russia, long before the start of the hostilities. Kantor agreed to show more than 60 works that expose the totalitarian and aggressive character of the current Russian regime at the MNHA.

  The exhibition also includes a painting specially created for the exhibition which gave the show its title: The Rape of Europe. Several rooms on the 4th floor happened to be empty because the floor was about to be refurbished. After consulting the artist, we decided to leave them in their current raw state. We staged this exceptional exhibition in collaboration with the Luxembourg Red Cross and invite visitors to make a donation to help Ukrainian refugees in Luxembourg.

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  Musée national d’histoire et d’art

  Culinary Night at MNHA: VERACE Food Truck Pizzeria

  Ongoing

  VERACE Food Truck Pizzeria is a family business that specialises in delicious Neapolitan-style pizzas. Each pizza is prepared in a wood-fired oven heated to over 450 degrees in front of the customer. VERACE works with the best ingredients to bring the taste of Italy to the streets of Luxembourg, thanks to the pizzaiolo and owner Maurizio.

• Photo credits:

  Photo 2: © Kultrun
  Photo 3: © Ro Gebhardt
  Photo 4: Gina Árvai © Philippe Schockweiler
  Photo 5: Gast Michels, Formule ‘x’, 1992, Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 70 cm, © Gast Michels Estate / Photo MNHA
  Photo 6: Chapeau colonial | Colonial hat|Kolonialer Hut © Collection privée / Photo MNHA
  Photo 7: Maxim Kantor, Minotaur, oil on canvas, 2014 © private collection Switzerland / Photo MNHA