Artist’s Talk: Zvi Goldstein with Eva Meyer-Hermann
“ReconstructedMemories”
Wednesday, 1 February 2012, 8.00 PM
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
K20 GRABBEPLATZ
Grabbeplatz 5
40213 Düsseldorf
Germany
T 0049.211.8381-204
F 0049.211.8381-209
service [at] kunstsammlung.de
Taking place on 1 February 2012 at 8 PM in the context of a KPMG Kunstabend is an artist’s talk, which accompanies the exhibition Zvi Goldstein – Haunted by Objects. Under the title “ReconstructedMemories,” Zvi Goldstein (Jerusalem) and exhibition organizer Eva Meyer-Hermann (Berlin) will speak about the artist’s current installation at the K20, his work since the 1970s, and his artistic philosophy.
The exhibition (until 26 February 2012) is the largest project to date undertaken by Zvi Goldstein, a conceptual sculptor and author who was born in Transylvania (Romania) in 1947. In the late 1970s, this resident of Jerusalem became one of the first artists to position himself both outside of and in relation to Western cultural contexts and to incorporate the challenges of a globalized world in his work. In Haunted by Objects, more than 850 highly diverse objects—dating from antiquity to the contemporary period and ranging from Byzantine coins to African masks and including everyday objects of recent origin—form a dense, intricate, and hybrid cosmos.
The point of departure for the work is a selection of 62 passages from Room 205, the artist newest book. Using a poetic language, which incorporates a variety of elements, the book depicts a flashback lasting a single minute, which is experienced by someone shortly after awakening in a hotel room. The text gives voice to a state of consciousness which resides between daydreaming, fantasy, and hallucination, and in which fragments of the protagonist’s own life are fused with artistic, cultural, and philosophical reflections in a kaleidoscopic fashion.
As a whole, Haunted by Objects is the grandiose attempt by an artist to use cultural objects and the narratives and worldviews preserved in them to give voice to his own sense of fascination. At the same time, this work calls conventional museological ordering into question while successfully delineating an image of our multidimensional world in the era of globalization.
Since in the 1980s, Goldstein has exhibited in Israel’s most important museums, and in major exhibition venues and galleries in Europe and North America. He has taken part in Biennales in Venice, Sydney, Istanbul, São Paulo, Shanghai, and Herzliya, as well as in the documenta in Kassel. He is a professor at the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Particularly since the 1990s, Goldstein has made extensive trips to secluded communities and cultures in Africa and Asia, which have been little influenced by the West. With his first book On Paper (Cologne 2004), Goldstein added a new dimension to his work. His second book, entitled Room 205 (Cologne 2010), is a long poem which deploys a variety of writing styles and shifting levels of consciousness to narrate a flashback, lasting a single minute, in which experiences, speculations, and hallucinations are intermingled with concrete observations and objects.
Additional information is available at: www.zvigoldstein.org
EVA MEYER-HERMANN, who lives in Berlin, has been an independent exhibition organizer since 2005. Since the 1990s, she has curated numerous survey exhibitions, among others on Carl Andre, Paul McCarthy, AllanKaprow, Martin Kippenberger, and Andy Warhol. Currently, she is organizing a retrospective of works by Mike Kelley (scheduled to open in 2012 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and additional venues). She is the editor of catalogues raisonnés for Luc Tuymans and Isa Genzken, both currently in preparation. She worked with Zvi Goldstein for the first time in 1998 when planning a solo exhibition in Nuremberg and Krefeld (together with Julian Heynen). For 2013, she is preparing a comprehensive retrospective of his work for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Further information is available at: www.cakesmeyer.de
The exhibition Zvi Goldstein – Haunted by Objects was organized by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
