KUB Arena Press release
KUB Arena
Living Archives – Cooperation
Van Abbemuseum
Francis Bacon, Michal Heiman, Hannah Hurtzig,
Robert Indiana, Katrin Mayer, Paul McCarthy
January 22 to April 3, 2011
Press conference:
July 18 to October 3, 2010
Thursday, January 20, 2011, 12 noon
The exhibition is opened for the press at 11.30 a.m.
Opening: Friday, January 21, 2011, 7 p.m.
What is an archive? What is a collection? What are the relationships between the
documents stored in archives and objects stored in collections concerned with
memory, identity, history, and politics? What narrations are implied in them and
towards which possible other ways of reading could they be expanded?
The collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven is a joint consideration of
the significance of archives and collections, which play a major role in the current
reconsiderations of artistic practices and conservations in the realm of the museum.
The project proposes a series of artistic and curatorial approaches, which formulate
individual and fragmented art histories, archives and collections, undermining more
canonized modes of operation and opening up alternative interpretation. Alongside
the exhibit Living Archive – Mixed Messages of the Van Abbemuseum, which
includes works by Francis Bacon, Robert Indiana and Paul McCarthy, works by
Michal Heiman, Hannah Hurtzig (both originating form the collection of the Van
Abbemuseum) and Katrin Mayer offer a range of processual and amenable strategies
of collecting and archiving. Given the failure of many institutions to present parallel
histories of their collections, the artists themselves started to search for their own
individual historical trajectories that might upset the established canon. They created
their own art narratives, archives, and collections.
Karl-Tizian-Platz
Postfach 371
A-6901 Bregenz
Telefon
(+43-55 74) 4 85 94-0
Fax
(+43-55 74) 4 85 94-408
E-Mail
kub@kunsthaus-bregenz.at
Web
www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at
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KUB Arena Press release
Katrin Mayer has staged a setting made of draperies and wall elements, unclosing
varying room segments for artistic contributions, for the presentation of the Van
Abbemuseum as much as for the additional events of the programme. In referencing
the conceptual frame of the archive, these transparent curtains produce a constant
sense of movement within the space, which neither point towards a clear centre, nor
to a linear structure to ease the perception of the space. Just as archives are not
perceivable without an impulse from the outside, Mayer’s translucent materials
relativise the differentiation between the inner and outer spheres of this space,
pointing to the necessity of their collaboration.
Based on the publications of the Kunsthaus, Katrin Mayer has developed a second
work for the KUB Arena. In the process of a ‘scattered reading of the “exhib ition
archive” on the Kunsthaus’ entrance counter, she copied a wide range of text and
image fragments from the books of the KUB and has rearranged them to form a
newly specified context, producing a distinct legibility of the materials and enabling
and interrogating a new frame of visibility for them. The motifs and narrations Mayer
chose formulate a relation to the space in which they are shown and are thus an
archival practice in themselves.
This presentation is accompanied by a selection of materials and artworks from the
project Living Archive – Mixed Messages, which is part of an exhibition series
curated by Diana Franssen, which took place at the Van Abbemuseum in different
formats and sequences of time. Mixed Messages shows three selected works from the
collection of the museum from various perspectives and visualizes the recourse to
documents from the archive, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ specific works were included into
the collection, how often they are on display and how their reception changes through
time. Each work is largely influenced by the social, political and economic factors
and as such acts as a medium of given ideologies as well as of national identities. The
thematic contexts, in which the works of Francis Bacon, Robert Indiana and Paul
McCarthy are shown, enable a reading which exceeds the realm of art’s immanence
and makes them perceivable as the results of social, political and economical factors.
From the 22nd of February 2011 onwards, the project will be extended to incorporate
the works Heiman Test – Experimental Diagnostics of Affinities by Michal Heiman
and Flight Case Archive by Hannah Hurtzig, which both activate the museum’s
visitor to himself interact with the materials of the archive, or rather, to experience
the impossibility of their unambiguous reading.
For Michal Heiman art is literally a field of research. Her work on psychological
experiments led her to the Szondi Test. In this diagnostic test developed by the
Hungarian psychiatrist Leopold Szondi, first published in the 1940s, subjects were
asked to react to photographs of psychiatric patients – choosing the ones they liked
and the ones they disliked. Szondi believed that their reactions could serve as a key to
the subjects’ psyches. Heiman employed the structures of the test to create her own,
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KUB Arena Press release
which will be conducted during the exhibition. The Heiman Test – Experimental
Diagnostics of Affinities, replaces the portraits of patients with images culled from
Heiman’s own archive and (extended) family album.
Dramaturge and curator Hannah Hurtzig will again present her Flight Case Archive, a
mobile audio-visual archive in the form of a transport case in which visitors can sit,
which has been growing continually since 2004. The FCA collects “stories about
places, cities and territories” in dialogues between two experts, between adviser and
client or between auto-biographer and listener. All the conversations have been
recorded live in the various installations of the Mobile Academy, in which knowledge
and information are staged as an act of communication and result of negotiation.
Expert knowledge, theoretical discourses, and biographical narratives combine in a
public cartography of memory, space and rhetoric.
The cooperation in the KUB-Arena opens up discussions on contemporary archival
practices, as well as the possibilities of assembling an archive at Kunsthaus Bregenz.
PROGRAM
January 25, 6 p.m.
Über naive und sentimentalische Archive, Lecture by Jürgen Thaler (Franz-MichaelFelder-Archiv, Bregenz)
February 4, 6 p.m.
Aufzeichnen und Einzeichnen – A test, extending beyond the rchive, with Doreen
Mende (curator, Berlin) & Katrin Mayer (artist, Berlin)
March 3, 6 p.m.
Lecture by Charles Esche (director Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven) & Galit Eilat
(curator Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven)
Experimental Diagnostics of Affinities
A live enactment of the Heiman Test Experimental Diagnostic of Affinities, Michal
Heiman’s newest test, will take place every Sunday between 12.30 pm and 2.30
p.m. from February 22 until April 3, 2011.
The test includes an individual session with an examiner, lasting approximately 15 –
20 minutes. Viewers are invited to sign up for a test session at the information desk.
Further program details will be made available separately.
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KUB Arena Press release
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KUB Arena Press release
Partners and Sponsors
The Kunsthaus Bregenz would like to thank its partners for their generous financial
support and the cultural commitment that goes along with it.
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KUB Arena Press release
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Venue/Organizer:
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Karl-Tizian-Platz
A-6900 Bregenz
Director
Yilmaz Dziewior
Chief executive
Artur Vonblon
Curator
Rudolf Sagmeister
Curator of the KUB Arena
Eva Birkenstock
Press and public relations
Birgit Albers
Phone: (+43-55 74) 4 85 94-413
Fax: (+43-55 74) 4 85 94-408
b.albers@kunsthaus-bregenz.at
Press photos to download
www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at
Art Education:
Winfried Nußbaummüller
Phone: (+43-55 74) 4 85 94-417
Fax: (+43-55 74) 4 85 94-408
w.nussbaummueller@kunsthausbregenz.at
Publications/editions
Katrin Wiethege
Phone: (+43-55 74) 4 85 94-416
Fax: (+43-55 74) 4 85 94-408
k.wiethege@kunsthaus-bregenz.at
Sales Editions
Caroline Schneider
Phone: (+43-55 74) 4 85 94-444
Fax: (+43-55 74) 4 85 94-408
c.schneider@kunsthaus-bregenz.at
Opening hours
Tuesday – Sunday 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Thursday 10 a.m. – 9 p.m.
Mardi gras
08.03.11 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.