Program 2015
Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Vienna
Austria
Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz
Treitlstraße 2
1040 Vienna
Austria
Hours: Daily 10am–7pm,
Thursday 10am–9pm
www.kunsthallewien.at
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Kunsthalle Wien’s central task in the coming year is to investigate art’s potential for a changing society. Socially relevant issues will be thematized from different perspectives to offer innovative access to an increasingly complex present. Reflections on artistic production and curatorial practice complete the program for 2015.
Pierre Bismuth: Der Kurator, der Anwalt und der Psychoanalytiker (The Curator, the Lawyer and the Psychoanalyst)
4 February–22 March
Pierre Bismuth’s major solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien will bring together works by the artist from the years 1988 to 2014. The exhibition presents Bismuth’s complex oeuvre, which spans all media and takes an experimental and humorous approach to conceptual strategies. Turning the act of selecting into a conceptual gesture, the works of art in the exhibition will not be chosen by the artist himself, but by three people with a different background each: a curator, a lawyer and a psychoanalyst.
The Future of Memory
4 February–29 March
Digital communication and virtual interlacing are defining our reality. Both production and consumption of media outputs lead to an omnipresence of digital media. The way knowledge, experiences and traditions are passed on is changing significantly, as are the formats of our individual and collective memory. The Future of Memory investigates how cultural methods of communication and historiography are currently being shaped by the virtualization of our interactions. These changes also have implications for practices in the field of contemporary art. In light of this, the exhibition assembles works by international artists who critically reflect on and undermine constructions of reality.
Destination Vienna 2015
17 April–31 May
Vienna is both a location and a destination for artistic productions, performances and communications that reach far beyond regional cultural boundaries. With its diversity of lifestyles, cultural expressions and divergences between the poles of tradition and innovation, the city generates a remarkably high potential for artistic discourse, output and transfer. Destination Vienna 2015 will present works by artists about the city of Vienna. In cooperation with Viennese galleries and cultural institutions—and therefore an extended number of creative positions—the event will take place at locations throughout the city for a period of six weeks.
“Curatorial Ethics” (conference)
9–11 April
Curating means to attend to something and thus also to take responsibility for it—for the curated works, the participating artists, the context the exhibition creates. In the curatorial field, important parameters have been shifting in recent years. We have seen subtle but lasting changes in the relationship between public and private collections, in the relationship between the institutional art establishment and the art market, in the relationship between curators and artists. The point of departure for this conference that will present a range of viewpoints is not so much to discuss deficiencies and problems, but instead to fundamentally acknowledge these changes.
Function Follows Vision, Vision Follows Reality
27 May–23 August
Friedrich Kiesler achieved fame through his groundbreaking work in the fields of architecture and design. However, he also created numerous innovative exhibition displays—such as in 1942 for Peggy Guggenheim’s private museum Art of This Century in New York—which constructively question essential aspects about exhibiting contemporary art. This exhibition, in cooperation with the Austrian Friedrich and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation in Vienna, centres on issues of display and brings works by Kiesler into a dialogue with relevant contemporary artists.
Individual Stories. Collecting as Portrait and Methodology
26 June–26 October
Collecting can be regarded as the attempt to save things from disappearance and oblivion. It embodies a subjective approach to our personal and collective stories. Artists as collectors can take on various roles: their own collecting obsessions can range from artworks or archival materials to kitsch. The exhibition will present collections as a fixation, as a character profile, and as a personal portrait of artists. This conceptual framework opens up space for the things that serve artists as sources of inspiration, derive from a particular passion, or reveal a private fetishism.
Charlemagne Palestine: GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt
18 September–8 November
In his work in performance, music, video and related media since the late 1960s, Palestine uses certain emblematic objects, including teddy bears, cognac and scarves, as signatures—what he terms “symbols of identification.” In recent years, he has collaborated with a diverse group of experimental musicians including Pan Sonic, David Coulter, Tony Conrad and Michael Gira. The Kunsthalle Wien exhibition will be the first retrospective dedicated to the artist. Offering a unique portrait of Palestine’s complex body of work, presentations will include an extensive program of the artist’s work in music and performance.
The Promise of Total Automation
23 October 2015–10 January 2016
“Things” have autonomous methods of information processing and communication. They communicate with each other and with their environment. It is not only technical devices that have this autonomous quality, but also ritual artefacts that, when charged with meaning, begin to lead a life of their own. The exhibition will investigate the fascination with this “process of autonomy” in modern society and its logics of production and accompanying digital communication systems. In recent years, artists have developed approaches to this theme—and various accompanying theories—and have produced works motivated by the rejection of animism and the glorification of automatism.
Political Populism
20 November 2015–13 March 2016
Not only is political populism on the rise, but it is also making stronger use of pop culture, artistic methods and aesthetics than previously seen. Social media, advertising aesthetics, and media staging, can lend a progressive appearance to simple or simplistic slogans. Rapping politicians, YouTube clips aimed specifically at young people, TV formats and pop concerts that present political themes and aim to make prejudice socially acceptable—these are all part of the current media landscape. In turn, artistic works reflect or comment on this tendency or lend it a further, subversive implication, using the mechanisms of political populism against this trend. The exhibition brings together works by artists who address various facets of populism and analyse and diffract it in ironic manner, above all pointing out how omnipresent it has become.
Press
Katharina Murschetz
T +43 (0) 1 5 21 89 1221 / katharina.murschetz [at] kunsthallewien.at
Stefanie Obermeir
T +43 (0) 1 5 21 89 1224 / presse [at] kunsthallewien.at
