Lecture by Moritz Küng (curator, Barcelona) and conversation with Heimo Zobernig (artist, Vienna)
May 19, 2011, 7 p.m.

Before conversing with Heimo Zobernig, Moritz Küng will deliver a brief lecture illuminating the relationship between architecture, design, and art using examples from his own practice. Architecture, design, and art represent different milieus, each with its own presuppositions, laws, and networks. They strive to render us more acutely aware of a spatial, objective, or emotional plane of existence and to shape our environments, everyday lives, and thoughts. Yet the relationship between the three disciplines is also more or less tension-filled: the more developed the interfaces between them are, the more diffuse their appearance becomes. In the context of unExhibit, the questions also arise: How much display can the exhibition take? How much exhibition, the architecture? And how much art, the display?

Moritz Küng (b. Luzern/CH 1961, lives in Barcelona) is a curator and journalist working at the interface between architecture and art. In 2010, he was appointed founding director of the Centre d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, which is scheduled to open in 2012. Between 2003 and 2010, he was responsible for programming at the deSingel International Arts Campus, Antwerp, where he realized solo exhibitions with artists including Peter Downsbrough, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Heimo Zobernig as well as architects including Christian Kerez, Lacaton & Vassal, OFFICE, and SANAA. He also initiated Curating the Library, a project featuring lectures and a library (2003–2010). He was curator of the Belgian pavilions at the São Paulo Biennial (2002) and the International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2008). Die fünfte Säule, a group exhibition he curates, will open at the Secession, Vienna, on September 8, 2011.

Heimo Zobernig (b. Mauthen/AT 1958, lives in Vienna) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1977 to 1980 and at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 1980 to 1983. He was a visiting professor at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg from 1994 to 1995, and a professor of sculpture at the State University of Fine Arts—Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, from 1999 to 2000. He has been a professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 2000. Solo exhibitions of his work have been on display at the Generali Foundation (1991), the Villa Arzon, Nice (1991), the Kunsthalle Bern (1994), the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1996), the MUMOK, Vienna (2002–2003), the deSingel International Arts Campus, Antwerp (2008), the CAPC, Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (2009), and the Kunsthalle Zürich (2011), among other venues. He participated in documenta IX, Kassel (1992), the Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997), documenta X, Kassel (1997), the Venice Biennale (2001), the Sydney Biennial (2004), the Busan Biennial (2006), and other exhibitions. A solo show of Heimo Zobernig’s work is currently on display at the Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg.