Die Ausstellung (The Exhibition)
August 23–September 20, 2014
Opening: September 20, 7pm
KIT – Kunst im Tunnel, Düsseldorf
Mannesmannufer 1b
40213 Düsseldorf
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday and holidays 11am–6pm
www.kunst-im-tunnel.de
www.dieausstellung.net
Die Ausstellung is scheduled to take place at KIT in Düsseldorf over a period of four weeks. During this time, the space will be continuously transformed, works will be set up, dismantled and documented. On the face of it, Die Ausstellung is a group show. It compiles diverse artworks that use the medium of photography as their starting point and evince a similar interest in processes involved in the creation of realities and of reproduction. All the stages involved in the exhibition—from preproduction and on-site production, advertising in posters, promotional texts and via social media platforms with their broad reach and mass usage, all the way to the temporarily installed works themselves—constitute the factors that ultimately come together to create the show itself.
As a show, Die Ausstellung is more staged than curated. The key focus lies less on the thematic and contextual connection between the works in question and more on the intervention into the whole construction of exhibiting as an entity in its own right. In this sense, Die Ausstellung is a kind of second-order exhibiting. Visitors can turn up to Die Ausstellung during the period indicated. Although it is open to the public, it shows the visitor much more than just a “presentation in process.” Die Ausstellung is geared towards its own end result, the catalogue, in which it is represented and reproduced. The catalogue will be presented publicly at KIT on the final day of the exhibition period and will be titled Die Ausstellung. Ultimately, the catalogue presents one version of the show, which, however, never took place and definitely could not take place. It is the simulation of an exhibition, the perfectly communicated and staged version of its sundry possibilities. Thus, the catalogue doesn’t constitute the medium documenting the exhibition, but rather what it produced. Die Ausstellung is a fiction, a manipulation of reality.
In its role as a reflexive practice, Die Ausstellung is concerned therefore with the structure of exhibiting per se, as well as the issues relating to the ways in which art is received in general. The concept of an experience—viewed primarily as “genuine” and authentic—is juxtaposed here with a game involving the medial effectiveness of an exhibition, a game charged with a principle of perception beyond communication and staging. In view of an observation that has become something of a commonplace in its own right in which everything is only ever an image and representation, Die Ausstellung postulates its form of representation as an illusion of reality and, precisely through this, is able to generate its own enigma: if an exhibition only takes place in the catalogue and nobody buys it, did Die Ausstellung actually take place?
Die Ausstellung is organized by the artists Alexander Basile & Alwin Lay, initiated by Gertrud Peters and Mischa Kuball in cooperation with -1/Minus Eins Experimentallabor KHM, Cologne.
Die Ausstellung shows 19 international artists. With Bastian Hoffmann (Munster), Peter Hermans (Leipzig), Balz Isler (Berlin), James Nizam (Toronto), Jan Hoeft (Cologne), Stephanina Solinas (Paris), Verena Seibt & Clea Stracke (Munich), Mia Boysen (Cologne), Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs (Zurich), Ian De Ruiter (Amsterdam), Paul Bailey (London), Peter Miller (Paris), Daniel Niggemann (Hamburg), Rhein Verlag (Dusseldorf), Arne Schmitt (Leipzig), Johannes Post (Hamburg), Mark Von Schlegell (Cologne/Los Angeles), Fleur Van Dodewaard (Rotterdam), and Bernhard Cella (Vienna).
Programme:
Sparda special on August 30 from 2pm
Guided tours, workshops, performances and live music
Free admission
Press contact:
KIT – Kunst im Tunnel
c/o Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Dirk Schewe
Grabbeplatz 4
40213 Düsseldorf
T +49 (0) 211 89 96 256 / F +49 (0) 211 89 29 576 / presse [at] kunst-im-tunnel.de
