Peter Friedl
Travail 1964–2006
30 June 16 September 2007
Opening: Friday, 29 June, 7:00 pm
[mac] Marseille
69 avenue de Haïfa
13008 Marseille – France
Tel : 33 (0)491 25 01 07
dgac-mac@mairie-marseille.fr
Open : Everyday 11am 6pm.
Closed on Mondays and bank holidays
What interests me about a new concept of genre is how it can create a difference to the old politics of identity. It offers the freedom to look at things more differently, which becomes again interesting in a political and aesthetic prospect. Things become a little strange if their relative autonomy is enforced.
Peter Friedl
Le [mac], musée dart contemporain de Marseille is pleased to present the retrospective exhibition Peter Friedl: Travail: 1964-2006.
Berlin-based artist Peter Friedl (born in Austria, 1960) has made a steady incision in the methods and conventions of contemporary art. He has held numerous solo exhibitions and participated in major group shows such as Documenta X and this years Documenta 12 ( www.thezoostory.de ). Presented today in the form of a retrospective, Friedls workconsistently heterogeneous in terms of medium, style, and meaninghighlights political awareness, autobiography, permanent displacement, design interventions, narratology, potential counter imagery, and the reinvention of genres left over from the history of modernism. His projects present aesthetic models for disarming configurations of power.
Peter Friedl: Travail 19642006 problematizes the genre of retrospective, that is, the musealization of an oeuvre within the framework of institutional logics and through the context of its own history. For this reason, the works and installations in this exhibition are edited and exhibited nearly as documents. In addition, the exhibition brings together a vast selection of drawings on paper, presented chronologically from Friedls earliest artistic production to the present. These drawings offer a glimpse of formal elements (handwriting, motifs, colors) and contents (historical references, signs, and symbols) that often reappear in other works and projects: The poster-piece Map (1969-2005) is based on an early drawing from 1969 assigning the names of Native American peoples to the U.S. territory. In Neue Straßenverkehrsordnung (New Traffic Code, 2000), Friedl uses neon to recreate a motif from 1995 in large scale. The reference is a RAF document from 1971, which outlines the possibilities and models of revolutionary activity in Western European cities.
In the form of conceptual aesthetic acts and based on exemplary brief actions, video works such as Dummy (1997) or Tiger oder Löwe (2000) investigate how art history and social history function. The video installation King Kong (2001) features songwriter Daniel Johnston against the backdrop of apartheid history, filmed in Triomf Parklocated in Sophiatown on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Also included is Friedls most recent production, Liberty Cityan homage to the community of Liberty City in Miami.
Started in 1995, Playgrounds consists of more than 700 color slides arranged for various digital wall projections in kid-size format. The picturesall in landscape format and taken by the artistshow public playgrounds from around the world. Another ongoing project, Theory of Justice, is presented as both an extensive installation and an artists book. Friedls project, begun in 1992, is based on the collection and selection of newspaper and magazine images, which are displayed in specially designed showcases.
The exhibition is produced by the Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Spain, and curated by Bartomeu Marí.
Peter Friedl: Travail 1964-2006 is accompanied by a 380-page catalogue book featuring a large selection of the artists writings, along with essays by Mieke Bal, Roger M. Buergel, Norman M. Klein, Bartomeu Marí, and a conversation with Jean-Pierre Rehm. The French version is published by Analogues and distributed by Les presses du réel.
