Annual program 2018

Charles Atlas
February 17–May 13, 2018 / Opening: Friday, February 16

The American artist Charles Atlas (b. St. Louis, Missouri, 1949) has been a leading figure in the domain of film and video art for almost fifty years, creating complex video installations and seminal films documenting dance and performance art. Atlas rose to renown with collaborative projects involving choreographers like Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) and Michael Clark (b. 1962) as well as the fashion designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery (1961–94). His network of creative collaborators and associates largely coincides with his circle of friends: many of his works from the 1980s and 1990s are portraits of fellow protagonists of the New York underground scene and the contemporary milieu, employing a sub- and pop-cultural idiom to scrutinize aspects of biopower and the politics of bodies and identity. To this day, younger generations of filmmakers regard Atlas’s visual language as a key reference; a prominent example is his cinematography in the fictionalized documentary Hail the New Puritan (1986), in which the camera becomes the subject’s active counterpart. One defining feature of Atlas’s work is his ongoing investigation of the expressive potentials of time-based media. He started experimenting with the defamiliarizing impact of techniques such as chroma key compositing back in the late 1970s. His more recent video installations, which are often highly technically complex, are abstract and playful explorations of an iconography of geometric series or numerical sequences, examining questions of the segmentation and structuring of the visual space as well as contemporary issues in the politics of representation.

The artist’s exhibition, curated by Raphael Gygax, will be his first solo show in Switzerland. It will feature a selection of works from the last 20 years as well as one recent piece. An accompanying monograph will be published by JRP|Ringier in 2018.

Teresa Burga
May 26–August 12, 2018 / Opening: Friday, May 25

With this extensive survey exhibition, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst introduces audiences to the many-faceted oeuvre of the Peruvian artist Teresa Burga (b. Iquitos, Peru, 1935), which encompasses paintings and environments in the vein of Pop art as well as conceptual drawings and cybernetic installations. This broad range of media, formal means, and aesthetic idioms goes hand in hand with a resolute thematic focus: Burga inquires into the latitude for individual action that remains given entrenched conventions and power structures. Her works are highly detailed protocols of the social realities of their time; their aim is to provide the beholders with information. With often playful precision, the artist highlights connections between causes and effects to draw attention to the individual’s ability to influence social conditions. The basis for such self-determination, Burga argues, is the systematic gathering of data and information that has been a salient consequence of technological progress. Widely unquestioned gender roles as well as stereotypes perpetuated by the art world are exposed to critical scrutiny. As a female exponent of Latin American art, Burga was often ahead of her time; now well over eighty, she continues to make art. Only in the past few years have the local as well as international art scenes begun to pay closer attention to her work.

Curated by Heike Munder, director, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the retrospective is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland. A monograph accompanying the show will be released by JRP|Ringier for the opening. The exhibition and catalogue are produced in collaboration with the Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover.

Koki Tanaka
August 25–November 11, 2018 / Opening: Friday, August 24, 2018

How do communities organize the way we live together? That is the question around which the work of the Japanese performance artist Koki Tanaka (b. Tochigi, Japan, 1975) has revolved since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. He looks for answers by staging participatory actions he documents in photographs and videos. His practice is based on the observation that humans exposed to exceptional situations and the associated disruption of everyday routines coalesce in short-lived micro-communities. A collaborative spirit lets them look to an imaginary ideal state of affairs for guidance; they trust and share more and develop new forms of interaction. Tanaka brings together people of different origin and with a variety of cultural backgrounds and assigns them tasks that allow them to rehearse modes of togetherness. His social studies pinpoint these induced instants of closer cooperation and social reconfiguration as well as the difficulties that arise. Transplanting everyday situations into the art setting turns it into a laboratory in which experiments of societal and ethical thinking as well as action are implemented. His projects often respond to the exhibition venue’s local history. The exhibition he has conceived for the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst will foreground the engagement with urgent problems facing global society such as immigration, racism, xenophobia, and nationalism—their very omnipresence makes it necessary to continually address these contentious issues from fresh perspectives. A group of people who live in Asia and Europe will examine them in a critical discourse as a form of social research. Documentation of the actions, which will be held in Japan, will be presented in the museum.

The exhibition is curated by Heike Munder, director, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, and is the artist’s first solo show in Switzerland. An accompanying monograph will be released by JRP|Ringier during the second half of 2018.

Maria Eichhorn
November 23, 2018–February 3, 2019

This exhibition of the artist Maria Eichhorn (b. Bamberg, Germany, 1962) at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst will bring together works created between 1988 and 2018. Since the beginning of her career, Eichhorn has made art interrogating codified norms that regiment everyday life and art, with a particular interest in socioeconomic processes. Value, time, property and possession are the foci of the questions that arise. Her work employs strategies of extensive research and sophisticated analysis to deliberately undermine the efficacy of these concepts. Reenacting established procedures, Eichhorn spotlights the ways in which they are incompatible with their designated purposes to allow for critical scrutiny and debate. By generating visibility, she creates platforms for fresh ways of thinking. The artist initiates processes of change whose repercussions can emerge over time and under the influence of the involved agents. The extraordinary complexity and opacity of the sets of issues the artist addresses contrast with the specific mode of precise presentation she has devised. Her most recent work, Κτίριο ως περιουσία άνευ ιδιοκτήτη / Building as unowned property (2017), which was co-produced by documenta 14, was first on view during the documenta at EMST, National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, will be revised for the exhibition and purchased for the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst’s collection.

Curated by Raphael Gygax. The book Κτίριο ως περιουσία άνευ ιδιοκτήτη / Building as unowned property will be released by JRP|Ringier in conjunction with the exhibition.