Some End of Things
25 May–15 September 2013
Museum für Gegenwartskunst,
Kunstmuseum Basel
mit Emanuel Hoffmann-Stiftung
St. Alban-Rheinweg 60
CH-4010 Basel
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm
With Michaela Eichwald, David Hammons, Judith Hopf, Fabian Marti, Ariane Müller, Jewyo Rhii, Nora Schultz, and Anicka Yi
The initial ideas for this exhibition were stimulated by artists whose working methods are defined by questions of artistic production. There seems to be a shared interest in that moment in which it becomes manifest how decisions come about and how process-oriented works—which are under the purview of the fleeting, the gestural, or the provisional—generate statements that are novel and particular. What is common to these works is a certain undermining of form, an uncoupling of meaning from a fixed system of contexts, and the often humorous way in which hyper-presence encounters an aesthetic of withdrawal.
In Judith Hopf’s work, for instance, she develops disharmonious and slapstick-like situations that are peppered with parodies of the mundane. Her project series Some End of Things—which provided the title for the Basel exhibition—pursues the matter of “tracing the beginnings and endings in societal and aesthetic processes.” Her video piece Some End of Things: The Conception of Youth (2011) on the other hand presents an absurd picture of a situation in which physical characteristics become hurdles and lead to social and cultural exclusion: an egg wanders through the atrium of a modernist architectural structure and fails in its attempt to gain entry into the glass, steel and concrete construction.
Nora Schulz, for her part, consciously makes use of painterly or sculptural gestures to provoke ruptures and lacunae in her installations. She foregrounds works that are literally physical traces. The production process itself takes on the central role in her prints, print-making machines, and performances, and it is conceptualized so as always to remain recognizable through its individual stages.
The works of Michaela Eichwald also address the production of art as an open process that eschews a more concrete conception of an ultimate outcome. In her collages, paintings, and objects, chance and experiment have a central significance: they are strategies to allow something to emerge that would then “produce its own meaning (as a thing).” Her sculptures unite things that stand in neither formal nor semantic proximity to one another. When they are brought together as a unit, what’s at stake seems to be form itself, which is always already intrinsic to production.
There is great potential in making visible how and by what means concepts arise. This exhibition undertakes the attempt to investigate the artistic decision-making process, and to find out where there may be possible parallels and mutual influences between the curatorial process and the evolution of artistic works. The works collected here highlight connections and ruptures, repetitions and contradictions that run counter to linear narration and, beyond that, provoke a constant change of perspective. Everything is in motion and a productive destabilization demonstrates that everything is in flux and capable of transformation: The fleeting gesture turns into a lasting memory; the controlled form into a provisional one; architectonic space into a dynamic network of sounds and personal associations.
Press office: Christian Selz, T 0041 (0) 61 206 62 06 / pressoffice [at] kunstmuseumbasel.ch
