Display (yourself)—Forms of presentation and performances
Symposium, April 15–16, 2011 (German)
an Exhibit (1957), an exhibition "without objects and without ideas," serves as a model and point of departure for contemporary debates over artistic and curatorial practices and the role of the beholders as well as collaborations around the topic of the display.
Moderated by Christian Höller (Art critic, Vienna)
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Program
Friday April 15, 2011, 6–9 p.m.
6 p.m.
Welcome: Sabine Folie, Director and Curator, Generali Foundation
6.15. p.m.
The Drama of Seeing
Lecture: Eva Maria Stadler
As fundamental preconditions of exhibiting, showing and seeing take place in ongoing interaction, raising the question of what informs the spaces of presenting and perceiving, and how they are predicated on one another. The drama of seeing, understood as active vision, rests on the assumption that a division of labor organizes the actions of producer and recipient; the exhibition display, as the interface between the two fields of action, accordingly plays a particularly important role.
Eva Maria Stadler (b. 1964), was director of the Grazer Kunstverein between 1994 and 2005; curator in residence at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, in 2006/07; and curator for contemporary art at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, between 2007 and 2011. Since 2011, she has been adjunct curator at the Belvedere. She has taught at the Merz-Akademie, Stuttgart, the State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
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7 p.m.
Display Incorporated
Lecture by Christian Teckert
Immersive displays and interactive spatial designs are increasingly popular instruments in museum settings that seek to cater to broad popular audiences. The loss of distance between subject and object is regarded as an opportunity to employ a production of affect as a way to gain more immediate access to the visitor’s emotional experience. In the context of (critical) contemporary artistic practices, by contrast, the display is seen as playing a sensitive role within a larger apparatus that, while serving the institution by generating a certain politics of visibility, might also allow for a reflection on that politics. The lecture will examine the degree to which current artistic practices and the mode of spatial production associated with them generate not only an ostensibly reflective figure of the critique of their own conditions of production but also, en passant, a different form of immersion in the aura of the institution.
Christian Teckert (b. 1967), lives in Vienna. Architect, curator, lecturer, writer in the fields of architecture, urbanism and theories of space. Since 2006 Professor of Space/Concept at the Muthesius University of Arts in Kiel (Germany) and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria). Founded the Office for Cognitive Urbanism with Andreas Spiegl in 1999. Founded as-if berlinwien with Paul Grundei and Stephanie Kaindl in 2001. Co-curator of exhibitions such as Studiocity (IPZ Vienna/Kunstverein Wolfsburg, 1999), Screenclimbing (Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2000), and ManifeSTATION (Manifesta7, Rovereto, 2008). Co-author and editor of Prospekt (2003) and Last Minute (2006), and co-editor of Negotiating Spaces (2010).
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7.45 p.m.
Not a show but a struggle
Lecture by Doreen Mende
Exhibiting generates a picture in space we can walk through, just as the camera produces the gaze. The question, then, is not so much whether the visitors to an exhibition "without pictures, " an exhibition of display formats, are attending a performance of iconoclasm. Rather: which possibilities of display can we conceive that neither place additional objects into the room nor distinguish between showing and not-showing? I am interested in an exhibition practice in which the idea of presentation gives rise to a situation of "struggle" (Patricia Lumumba): the activation of an arena in which withholding makes a "gesture of revolt" (Jean Genet) public.
Doreen Mende, (b. 1976) is a curator and lives in Berlin. She is working on her PhD project in Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmiths College, University of London about "Inhibition as a Possibility for Exposure;" she also serves as a theory mentor at the Dutch Art Institute. KP Brehmer: A Test Extending Beyond the Action, an exhibition she has curated, is currently on view at the Centro Anadaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC) Seville.
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8.30 p.m.
Final discussion
The entire evening will be moderated by Christian Höller (Art critc, Vienna)
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Saturday, April 16, 2011
3 p.m.
Mathias Poledna is an artist and lives in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions of his work have been on view at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne; Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna; at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, among other venues. He participated in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the 2004 Berlin Biennale, the 2004 Liverpool Biennial, and the 2008 Yokohama Triennial. His work Double Old Fashion is currently on display at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). In the fall of 2011, Florian Pumhösl and he will present a joint exhibition at Raven Row, London.
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3.30 p.m.
Who’s Afraid of Exhibiting?
Lecture by Sabeth Buchmann
The proposed contribution examines the role exhibition displays play with regard to the interplay between institutional critique and "techniques of relation" in the sense of "social networks and cultural nodes" (Brian Massumi). This line of inquiry brings up the shift from (re)presentationist to performative modes of displaying, contextualizing, communicating, and distributing, and the corresponding rising desire for symbolic actions to "become real" in the medium of the exhibition. If the idea is to draw on unExhibit as an example for a discussion of fundamental interconnections between artistic and curatorial methods, another aim is to locate these methods within an expanded conception of institutionality.
Sabeth Buchmann, art historian and art critic. Professor for Modern and Postmodern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Head of Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies. Regular contributions to edited volumes on art theory and practice, exhibition catalogues and art magazines. With Helmut Draxler, Clemens Krümmel and Susanne Leeb editor of Polypen, a series of publications on art criticism and political theory
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4.15. p.m.
R.R., et al.
Lecture by Johannes Porsch
The "how" that Roussel inscribes in the title of his last, revelatory work introduces not only the secret of his language, but also his relationship with such a secret, not to lead us to it, but rather to leave us disarmed and completely confused when it comes to determining the nature of the reticence which held the secret in a reserve suddenly abandoned. (Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth)
Johannes Porsch, artist, curator, and author. Since 2010, he has been an artistic researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, where he is involved with the research project "Troubling Research." Between 2001 and 2007, he was a curator at Architekturzentrum Wien. He has written, organized exhibitions, and published about politics of representation and the processes of subjectivation they entail; his work includes Sturm der Ruhe. What is Architecture (2001), Ottokar Uhl. (2005), The Austrian Phenomenon (2004/2009), Un jardin d’hiver, präsentiert (2006), Chinaproduction (2007), Suche Bauplatz für Moschee/ Aa (2008/2010), Transitory Objects (2009), Tanja Widmann. Sich in diesem Sinne ähnlich machen (2010).
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5 p.m.
Final discussion with Sabeth Buchmann, Doreen Mende, Mathias Poledna, Johannes Porsch, Eva Maria Stadler and Christian Teckert.
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The entire event will be moderated by Christian Höller.
Christian Höller is an editor and co-publisher of the journal springerin—Hefte für Gegenwartskunst. He was a visiting professor at the École supérieure des beaux-arts, Geneva, between 2002 and 2007; a sub-curator of the exhibition See This Sound (Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, 2009; exhibition section "Site Sound Industry"); and curator of the film series No Wave 1976–84 (56th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, 2010). He published the anthologies Pop Unlimited? (2001) and Techno-Visionen (2005) as well as the catalogue Hans Weigand (2005), and is author of the interview collection Time Action Vision: Conversations in Cultural Studies, Theory, and Activism (2010).
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