PERFORMACE: A Journey (Mudam Museum Performance Programme 2026)
Throughout 2026, Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean will present its performance programme “A Journey”. Taking the concept of journey as both method and metaphor, the series brings together artists who navigate cultural memory, technological progress and embodied interpretation. Although often defined by time and space, a journey inherently suggests openness: some parameters and encounters may be anticipated in advance, while others emerge, shift or reveal themselves along the way.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Mudam Museum Archive
By exploring movement in all its forms and modes of grounding in a city increasingly shaped by migration, the series pushes beyond entrenched understandings of time and history, foregrounding intimate, overlooked and queer temporalities. Mudam places performance at the heart of its programming and is dedicated to presenting the breadth of contemporary approaches and perspectives in the discipline today. “A Journey” is not conceived as a theme; rather, the performance series proposes an approach to looking at and experiencing performance. Each work invites the public into immersive and unexpected encounters. The series will offer new discoveries and opportunities in the second half of 2026.
In March 2026, the series begins with “Casemates”, by Amsterdam-based artist Ivan Cheng. The new commission merges an interactive installation with a sequence of performances. The proximity of Mudam to Luxembourg’s historical fortifications and casemates forms the point of departure for Cheng to probe questions of storage, preservation and transformation in collaboration with visitors, inviting them to re- evaluate their digital archives and files in relation to the notion of ‘trash’.
The European premiere of “I Do Nine-Tailed Fox”, a new work by Seoul-based artist Sojung Jun. Weaving together live music with archival footage and newly produced film material, the performance revisits the history of the Koryo theatre in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Founded in Vladivostok in 1932 by the Koryo-saram, the cultural institute relocated with the ethnic community when it was forcibly displaced from the Soviet Union’s Far East to Central Asia in 1937. The theatre remains active today as a living archive of survival and transformation. Jun parallels this history with the myth of the shapeshifting East Asian gumiho, or nine- tailed fox.
Brussels-based dancer and choreographer Mohamed Toukabri works across diverse spheres through movement – from hip hop to postmodernism, street to stage, parent to child, personal to political. Every-Body-Knows is a spatial adaptation of Toukabri’s stage work “Every- Body-Knows-What-Tomorrow-Brings-And-We-All-Know-What-Happened- Yesterday” (2025). Translated to the museum context, the work shifts from a linear, time-based performance to a constellation of bodily presences unfolding across multiple spaces.
SERAFINE1369 perceives dance as an intimate technology. For Mudam’s outdoor spaces, the London-based artist will develop “IV (for II)” as an extension of the work IV (2023), created as both a modular piece and a dancing practice. The body of work is about finding space and seeking freedom by moving towards oneself and one another – to co-exist without the feeling of taking or giving away too much. As a system of loose dancing within a tight structure, the performance unfolds as a meditative interplay of instinctive rhythms, encounters across bodies and the counting of time.
Performances 2026
Ivan Cheng, Casemates
- 07 + 08 + 28.03.2026 | 16:30
- 08.04.2026 | 19:00
- 19.04.2026 | 16:30
- 02.05.2026 | 16:30
- 13.05.2026 | 19:00
Sojung Jun, I Do Nine-Tailed Fox
- 25 + 26.04.2026 | 16:30
Mohamed Toukabrim Every-Body-Knows
- 16 + 17.05.2026 | 16:30
SERAFINE1369, IV (for II)
- 20.06.2026 | 14:00 + 16:30
Photo: SERAFINE1369, I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless), The Bluecoat, 2021 Liverpool Biennial Photo: Katarzyna Perlak
Info: Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, 3 Park Dräi Eechelen, Luxembourg-Kirchberg, www.mudam.com/
