Pickly Wiggly takes its title from Piggly Wiggly®, the first fully self-service grocery store, founded by Clarence Saunders in 1916. By introducing open shelves and self-selection, the supermarket transformed shopping into a system organized around efficiency, circulation, and choice. This model laid the foundation for the contemporary supermarket as a highly functionalized space.
However, self-service does not necessarily imply freedom. Over time, shelves, layouts, visual languages, and technical infrastructures have evolved into precise systems that pre-structure choice. Value is sorted before products appear, and decisions are guided before consumers are aware of making them. What presents itself as abundance and convenience often conceals mechanisms of control, substitution, delay, and differentiation.
Pickly Wiggly reframes the supermarket from a site of everyday consumption into a lens through which broader social, economic, and technological structures can be critically observed.
Welcome to Pickly Wiggly, your self-service supermarket of curated choices!
Images are staged and may differ from actual in store conditions.
All selections are pre-arranged for smooth circulation.
Special offers on value and desire may be applied without notice.
Some options may be unavailable or already decided.
With the kind support of Akademievereins Münchens
Since 2015, the municipal art space KUNSTARKADEN has presented the exhibition series “arkadenale” every two years. For the 6th edition in 2025, we have invited artists who once lived and worked in Munich but left the city for very different reasons. For “arkadenale” 2025, they now return with new perspectives, current works, and personal stories in tow.
The exhibition brings together the artistic positions of these returning artists in a cohesive presentation. This “comeback” is more than a purely geographical reunion: the exhibition opens a dialogue between earlier creations and current practices, between individual life paths and the collective urban experience of the artists.
Munich becomes a resonance space for memories, ruptures, developments—and new connections.
KUNSTARKADEN invites the public to discover Munich in a new way, through the eyes of those who have returned.
The Munich-based artists Veronica Burnuthian, Aelita le Quément, Santiago Archila Salcedo, and Vincent Hannwacker are presenting their exhibition “FRÉMITO” at the KUNSTARKADEN with a hypnotic and colorful blend of works that explore dreamscapes, spirituality, and the subconscious.
Aelita le Quément transforms the space with her painterly wallpaper and wall works into a four-dimensional hall of mirrors. The enclosing walls reveal their limits through torn, cracked surfaces—a state of physical transformation. The shredded surface points to a cycle of decay, corruption, and rebirth, a condensed essence of birth, life, and death.
Veronica Burnuthian addresses mental health, queer identity, cultural memory, and systemic inequality in her work. These themes flow into her music project Soft Violet, which combines electronic sounds with spoken word passages. This synthesis creates a space for emotional and intellectual engagement. In her paintings, a remarkable development unfolds—from initial explosive emotionality to more subtle, reflective works. This transformation reflects a deeper engagement with the complex themes that shape her art. In her artistic practice, Veronica Burnuthian experiences the act of creation as a multilayered process of reparation and survival. She fills historical and personal gaps with silk—a material of symbolic power that embodies both fragility and strength. This directly relates to the Armenian experience: her act of sewing is a traditional act of survival, embodying the resilience and creative will of a people who have continuously re-created and preserved culture, language, and memory after trauma—often through matrilineal transmission.
Vincent Hannwacker presents paintings that play with the colors and motifs of summer. They feature pop-inspired figures that appear both alluring and mysterious. The works resemble snapshots and fragments from unfinished stories.
Santiago Archila Salcedo explores themes ranging from new mythology to reinterpretations of biblical moments, drawing on fantastical worlds. At the Kunstarkaden, he presents installative drawings and an installation made of cattle bones, together forming a comic-style collage. An accompanying video installation deepens the visual and thematic impact of the works, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the complex narratives.
For the Long Night of Museums on October 18, 2025, the artists invite visitors to a special program highlight:
At 8, 9, and 10 pm, a Midnight Screening will take place, featuring specially produced short films in the genres of horror and science fiction. These cinematic works enter into a thrilling dialogue with live music, which reinterprets and intensifies the atmosphere of the films. The interplay of image and sound creates an immersive experience that transposes the themes of the exhibition onto another sensory level.
In the Dadaist cosmos of ‘Kyoto Morph and the Four Feet of Benjamin’, poetic and absurd visual worlds unfold between dream and reality. Babi Brüller, Luisa Baldhuber, Florian Donnerstag and Nina Markhardt interweave painting, installation, sculpture and expanded pictorial spaces to create a symphonic landscape of colour. Between Far Eastern tranquillity and urban surrealism, whimsical scenarios emerge that draw the eye and arouse curiosity without giving too much away. A kaleidoscopic togetherness that invites you to linger with humour and poetry.
In her work, Babi Brüller explores her family’s Jewish heritage as well as social structures and the power of authoritarian collectives. Movable, mostly life-size dolls in slightly grotesque depictions occupy the exhibition space. Large-format paintings show groups of similar, androgynous individuals (e.g. choir singers, schoolchildren, soldiers) in surreal spaces in which the uncanny dynamics of these groupings are inherent.
In her artistic work, Luisa Baldhuber deals with the interplay of color, space and light and their influence on our perception. Based on classical painting, she transfers color surfaces into space, breaks through architectural structures and opens up new dimensions between fiction and reality.
Florian Donnerstag’s work deals with the ambivalence between form and design. Breaks, asymmetries and the deliberate questioning of content serve as artistic tools in his paintings. In his practice, content becomes a formal element that unfolds beyond unambiguous symbolism and develops an anti-symbolic effect. In this way, he creates works that defy any unambiguous legibility and open up new narrative levels.
Nina Markhardt explores the role of fungi and algae on different levels of time and works with biodegradable materials. Her bioplastic sculptures and paintings stand for a sustainable artistic approach and address the interconnectedness of all living beings.
Flyer_Kyoto Morph und die vier Füße von Bejamin
Start your evening in the municipal art spaces.
Come by for insights, exchange or just for fun.
Free admission, art, punch & snacks
5-7 pm
The municipal art spaces around Marienplatz invite you to get to know a new exhibition every month in either the Artothek & Bildersaal, the Kunstarkaden, the MaximiliansForum or the Rathausgalerie.
This time, the Kunstarkaden are delighted to invite you to the exhibition “Der Preis”. You can start your evening with punch, snacks and art and meet nice people. Come alone or with friends, for insights, exchange or just for fun. We look forward to seeing you!
The event is free of charge.
‘Der Preis’ is an exhibition that makes the art market tangible as a game of chance. Four artists jointly invest a starting capital from their own pockets, each work sold feeds a growing jackpot, and in the end only one buyer wins the entire amount.
This setting creates an immediate metaphor for the economic reality of art: while buyers are guided by hopes of profit, artists also bear the risk and jeopardise their own future.
Eröffnung
Dienstag, 28. Januar 2025, 19 Uhr
mit einer Einführung von Kunsthistorikerin Dr. Olena Balun
Ausstellungsdauer
29. Januar bis 16. März 2025
Eröffnung zur Schmuckwoche
Mittwoch, 12. März 2025, ab 19 Uhr
mit einer Einführung durch die Künstler*innen
und mit Musikperformance von DJ Hans Hiptmair
Sonderöffnungszeiten zur Schmuckwoche
13. bis 16. März 2025, 13 – 21 Uhr
In the exhibition “LET THERE BE LIGHT”, Marion Blume, Nora Reitelshöfer and Florian Clemens Meier show current jewelry works. The artists study in Prof. Karen Pontoppidan’s Jewelry & Appliance class.
In the exhibition “3”, Anna Livia Dörr, Veronika Günther and Niloufar Shirani are showing a selection of current works, including installation, sculpture, video and painting.
Anna Livia Dörr seeks an experimental approach to ceramic masses, exploring their characteristics, allowing breaks and fragments to exist. Her ceramics are image, image carrier and sculpture in equal measure, and her handling of line, surface and color is partly graphic, painterly and partly sculptural in nature. Anna Livia Dörr’s works deal with challenge and loss of control, approach and distance and the uncertainty in between.
Veronika Günther draws mainly from memory. Images from everyday life appear in her drawings as well as motifs from literature, film and other mass media, memories and scraps of dreams. Personal and public material intertwine to create an associative narrative with a cinematic character. Reduced to the essentials, distortions in perspective and anatomy arise and bring an incalculable element of visual humor and poetry to the scenes depicted. In the installation The End in the Kunstarkaden, the artist shows text images made of fabric with lyrics from songs, such as Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, on the themes of transience, loss and the uncertainty of the future.
Niloufar Shirani engages in a profound dialog with the myths of ancient Persia and links them with the life experiences of contemporary people. In her works, the relationships between humans, animals and nature are continuously repeated and interwoven. Ancient symbols are reinterpreted through modern science and technology as well as in medical and anatomical forms. In doing so, she unfolds a puzzle of non-linear narratives. In the Kunstarkaden exhibition, Niloufar Shirani presents installations of her ceramic sculptures combined with video and images.
Under the title NETZE, Diana Galli, Julie De Kezel, Aki Kiefer and Giovanni Raabe have come together to create an experimental exhibition in the Kunstarkaden space through collaboration and exchange. In addition to the heterogeneous artistic modes of expression that they all contribute individually, theorists will also be brought in and become part of the exhibition in the form of open discussion rounds. It revolves around new forms of togetherness and connection, like parts of a network that grows from knot to knot from many different strands and derives its strength from the diversity of the individual components. The exhibition also refers thematically to the following excerpt from Donna Harraway’s work ‘Staying With The Trouble’: ‘Thread games are like stories. They suggest and enact patterns so that they can somehow be inhabited by those who play the game. (…) Playing with threads is about passing on and receiving patterns, about dropping threads and failing, but sometimes also about finding something that works, something consistent and perhaps even beautiful; something that wasn’t there yet, a passing on of connections that count; a storytelling that goes from hand to hand, from finger to finger, from connection point to connection point – to create conditions that allow finite flourishing on earth, on terra. Thread games require one to hold still in order to receive and pass on. Thread games can be played by many, with all kinds of limbs, as long as the rhythm of give and take is maintained.’ From sound to objects and painting, all areas come together in a shared immersive installation and interact with both the Kunstarkaden space and the visitors to the exhibition.
All participating artists live and work in Munich.
The exhibition “Traces of Existence” consists of the works of four artists, Isu Choi (Seoul – Korea), Arisa Inoue (Hyogo – Japan), María Eugenia Muñoz (Montevideo – Uruguay) and Suvi Tupola (Kangasala – Finland), who are part of Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (AdBK), class for jewellery and hollowware, Germany. Through their work, they reflect on the remnants that human beings leave behind. They speak not only of memories, but also of the transformations and traces that take place or are left in nature. These reflections are created by exploring different materials, some reused and others of natural origin. The exhibition will feature four very different perspectives, closely related to the artists’ origins, experiences and personal views of society and the environment in which we live.
The inspiration for the sand in the exhibition comes from the idea of zen gardens.
It is related to the philosophical concept of impermanence; the thought that everything changes,
flows, comes into existence and disappears from the world. The sand shifts and the patterns
change in appearance, like flowing water.
The exhibition itself is in a state of constant motion. Visitors have to walk across the sand on the floor to properly see the pieces, leaving footprints and moving the sand. The pieces will also move, leaving behind traces of their previous positions.