“For Children: Art Stories Since 1968” surveys artistic practices that cast kids as equal parts audience and collaborators, dating their origins to the 1960s and 1970s while focusing on developments of the past two decades. Writing about an exhibition intended for such an audience poses a challenge in terms of standpoint. How to observe the works and display without sounding, to put it bluntly, too adult? I identified four options: 1) try to perceive things as a child would, accessing distant memories and sensations to search for my own uncorrupted naivety; 2) observe children visiting the exhibition and attempt to decode their pre-aesthetic reactions as they interact with the works; 3) focus on the conception and realization of gestalt as a seasoned critic; or 4) scrap all of this and make a hodgepodge out of it.

Harun Farocki (1944–2014) is present with four short videos from “Bedtime Stories” (1973–77), a series created for German television that begin with a simple, if off-kilter, conceit: having his daughters act out tales of inanimate outputs in West Germany, such as railways, bridges, and ships. (I will omit the cat episode.) A dialogue in the manner of magical realism, associating objects to seemingly unrelated actions and contexts, runs through each video, accompanied by classical lullaby music, as the editing alternates between two shots: the two girls interacting in a large bed, surrounded by pink blankets and children’s drawings; and outdoor sequences representing the objects they’re fantasizing about. When one child tells the other about a boat that can navigate in the air, one wonders, as the sequence shifts, if the boat that we see drifting along a bridge-canal, actually suspended in midair, is fictional or real.

Left: Harun Farocki, Bedtime Stories (Cat), 1973–74; right: Rivane Neuenschwander, in collaboration with Guto Carvalhoneto, The Name of Fear / Rio de Janeiro (Monster | Stranger), 2017. Installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2025. Photo: Agostino Osio

When the topic is more overtly money or the capitalist system itself, direct or indirect interaction with children can come off as patronizing, to the point of being unintelligible. In Jan Peter Hammer’s (*1970) 2013 video The Jungle Book, sock puppets lectured by an old, ultra-liberal sock discuss economics at a level a child could understand. The video, it turns out, seems regrettably disinterested in whether such pedagogy is actually achievable, preferring to hone in on the meta-language of children’s television programs. Still, I hope its Marxist perspective will encourage some Munich collectors to step outside their bubble; during my visit, the screen was entirely unattended, despite Emily Floyd’s (*1972) invitingly colorful sculpture, Steiner Rainbow (6 Meters) (2025) occupying the same room.

Understandably, many works engage children through play. Ernesto Neto’s (*1964) monumental, womb-like playground, Uni Verso Bebé II Lab (2007/ 2025), was more popular among young visitors, perhaps for the free movement it permitted, than Yto Barrada’s (*1971) Lyautey Unit Blocks (Play) (2010): While hinting at architectural modernization during Morocco’s colonial past, it seemed to fail as a plaything, simply because its parts may be too large to handle. Other evidences of playdates past include the superhero suits of The Name of Fear (2015–25), designed by kids in a workshop from Rivane Neuenschwander (*1967), as well as video documentation of Lygia Pape’s (1927–2004) 1967 performance Divisor (Divider), where children from the favela near her studio poked their heads through slits in a large piece of cloth – a conceptualized hide-and-seek.

Foreground: Emily Floyd, Steiner Rainbow (6 Meters), 2025; behind: Jan Peter Hammer, The Jungle Book, 2013. Installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2025. Photo: Agostino Osio

Some of the contributions here proved more fraught than others. Antoine Catala’s (*1975) Jardin synthétique à l’isolement (Synthetic Garden to Isolation, 2014) reproduces an artificial green space, punctuated by trees, screens with stick-figure animations, and monochrome rocks engraved with haptic pictograms. While its intention, designed in collaboration with nonverbal children and relevant professionals, was a reshaped relation to nature and play, the deeply shadowed, 3D-render-like mise-en-scène verges on the uncanny. Not dissimilarly, the colorfulness of Goodness and Disaster (2025), a multimedia installation by Agus Nur Amal PMTOH (*1969) including artifacts from participatory street theater and television broadcasts, is initially soothing – until one realizes that the toy components comprise not only a therapeutic response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, but are literal remnants of its wreckage in Indonesia, bearing witness to life that no longer exists.

Claire Fontaine conceived of the readymade artist as a departure from the spectacular and individualistic image of the (post)modernist, or relational, artist. Similarly, to me, “For Children” seems to be trying to escape the cage of the thematic exhibition by appealing to a readymade audience apparently lacking an art-historical tradition (artist Palle Nielsen’s 1968 transformation of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm into an adventure playground being an exception that proves the rule). It’s significant that, despite a title implying a sixty-year panorama, most of the works here are so recent. Furthermore, this exhibition might have acknowledged the historicity of its approach: Paul Klee exhibited his preschool drawings during his lifetime and created dozens of hand puppets for his son; Hannah Höch collaged picture books specifically for children; and artists like Vladimir Izdebsky and Mikhail Larionov included children’s drawings in seminal group shows, to mention but a few examples from the 20th-century vanguard. Then again, a longer history might only make a larger cage to escape from. And beware – even if you escape, there’s still lava on the floor.

Antoine Catala, Jardin synthétique à l'isolement (Synthetic Garden to Isolation), 2014. Installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2025

Agus Nur Amal PMTOH, Goodness and Disaster, 2025.
Installation & performance view, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2025. Photo: David Levene

Yto Barrada, Lyautey Unit Blocks (Play), 2010. Installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2025. Photo: David Levene

“For Children: Art Stories Since 1968”
Haus der Kunst, Munich
18 Jul 2025 – 1 Feb 2026