Collection as Cosmos exhibition guide

Collection as Cosmos is an exhibition research companion that brings together manuals, essays, and visual documentation to think differently about how art—and time itself—might be organized. At its heart is the Van Abbemuseum’s collection of modern and contemporary art, whose histories, contradictions, and possibilities become fertile ground for imagining other ways of living with the past, present, and future.

Departing from the linear structures that tend to organize museum collections, the book takes up the Greek root of kosmos, meaning both order and decoration. Materials gather like star clusters across time, forming constellations around four artistic practices and temporal propositions: Regenerative Time, Unchronological Time, Public Time, and Cosmic Times. Through questions of grief and mourning, personal and institutional histories, rest and recuperation, and celestial and agricultural knowledge, these constellations offer different ways of contending with modernity.

Made for those who have encountered the collection display and those who may never have the chance, Collection as Cosmos offers a departure point for finding more just and joyful ways of living in our shared everyday.

Publication launch
October 24, 2026, 16:15–17:15
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
During Conference The Universe is Bigger Than