This summer, the Haus der Kunst, Munich, reimagines the role of the observer. For Children is a celebration of naivety and curiosity, and fills the entire building, spilling out into the surrounding gardens like a child colouring outside the lines. The head curator Andrea Lissoni makes a point of declaring that the exhibition was designed for and with children, not about them. During the press conference, an attendee nervously asked, “How do you prevent children from touching the art?” Lissoni assured her that interactivity is the point. 

As a case in point, Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Mega Please Draw Freely (2021/2025) spans the Mittelhalle and invites visitors to scribble on the marble floor with coloured markers, drawing, as children always do, giant flowers and hearts and signing their names in wobbly, haphazard scrawls. Ernesto Neto’s enormous, womblike installation Uni Verso Bébé II Lab (2007/2025) resembles a bouncy castle or the childhood memory of your parents’ bed, and encourages visitors to take off their shoes and slip behind the curtain.
It was great to see so many self-serious art people sat around a table of Lego bricks (Olafur Eliasson) or lounging in the tulle-and-polystyrene ballpit (Neto), building miniature structures as they talk about their work, absentmindedly returning to the infantile instincts behind art, to play. 

But the most charming work in the exhibition was Harun Farocki’s short film Bedtime Stories (1973-77), which stars his young twin daughters as two wide-eyed protagonists. The film explores the poetics of childish imagination as the girls lull each other asleep with the mundanities of transport infrastructure. Cable cars, drawbridges and canals which cross over rivers: illusion and delusion form the basis of the girls’ idle daydreams, a game of analytics and imagination. The films were based on the director’s walks around the city with his daughters.  

This gentle breaching of the “adult” world is not unique to Farocki’s film. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Rivane Neuenschwander’s The Name of Fear (2015-25) is a collection of capes co-designed with children, naming that which scares them the most. One says “tomato salad,” another “fascism.” This candidness, as comical as it is uncanny, reminds us what the exhibition sets out to prove: childhood is not a separate phase of life but when we encounter the world for the first time, forming perceptions and anxieties which we bring with us. As such, childhood is never really over at all. .

“For Children: Art Histories since 1968” runs at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, until February 1, 2026.