Kunstverein Arnsberg is a non-profit institution dedicated to contemporary art and located at the historic centre of Arnsberg. Since 1987 the institution develops a local and international programme of exhibitions and public projects like readings, screenings and performances. It has, amongst others, presented solo exhibitions by Santiago Sierra, Alfredo Jaar, Julieta Aranda, Erwin Wurm and Susan Philipsz. In addition and throughout the years, it also got active in the urban space. Today, it looks back to a series of sculptures in the public space by Santiago Sierra, Timm Ulrichs, Julius von Bismarck and many more that were realized in cooperation with the city of Arnsberg.

The spacious rooms of the Kunstverein are located on the first floor of a classicist town house on the central Neumarkt, a square built according to plans by Schinkel, whose building fabric has been preserved. Located in the heart of the old town, with a view of the Neumarkt as well as its own idyllic garden, many artists choose to extend the spatial presentation with outdoor projects.

The close cooperation with the artists and the personal, familiar atmosphere create an immediate, constructive basis for site-specific experiments and unconventional new productions. Small and flexible, Kunstverein Arnsberg can also react quickly to major challenges and realise projects as uncompromisingly and promptly as possible. Kunstverein Arnsberg is actively involved in public space and has produced more than 50 projects in Arnsberg's urban space since 2009. Consistently and sustainably, the projects in the publicly accessible Lichthaus open up further fields of action in dialogue with daily life.

The Lichthaus Arnsberg is a postmodern, striking glass pavilion in which the Kunstverein Arnsberg curates further projects together with the cultural office of the city of Arnsberg. It is located in the inner courtyard of Wedinghausen Monastery (12th century) in the immediate vicinity of the Kunstverein. Since 2009, projects and exhibitions have been taking place there, often developed exclusively for the Lichthaus. Visible to all around the clock, this creates a direct, open platform for encounters with contemporary art.

Most of the artists presented have had their first institutional solo exhibition at Kunstverein Arnsberg, but established positions such as Karin Sander (2008), Erwin Wurm (2008) and Alfredo Jaar (2012) have also made important statements.

In 2016, Kunstverein Arnsberg has been awarded with the ADKV-Art Cologne Prize for the best Kunstverein in Germany. While the relationship between the arts, nature and politics has always played an important role in its programme, the Kunstverein will focus even more on artistic positions that reflect upon these topics as well as different aspects of our contemporary life like sustainability, ecology, sociology, religion, daily routines, architecture, urban planning, science, technology, the digital and the future.

We organize several large scale group and solo exhibitions with the general goal to tackle upon current questions on art and society and foster our critical understanding of the relation of the two.

Every 10 year Kunstverein Arnsberg has published a major publication covering the exhibitions and projects that took place in that timespan. The latest publication was published in 2022 and is called Zeitgeister, edited by Vlado Velkov who was been the artistic director between 2009-2018.