“…and yet one more world”

In the context of the exhibition “…and yet one more world,” presented by Kunsthaus Hamburg, the oeuvre of the seminal German Conceptual artist Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) serves as a starting point for an exploration of its present-day impact and relevance from the perspective of a younger generation of international artists.

Accompanied by a selection of works created by Darboven’s contemporaries, the exhibition focuses specifically on protagonists of contemporary art, who are engaged in questions and strategies similar to those that Darboven investigated in her work. 

Darboven’s characteristic conflation of an abstract, overarching framework and individual self-assertion are resonant in the sign structures conceived, for example, by Channa Horwitz or Michael Müller, as well as in the textual works and writing systems of Fiona Banner, Irma Blank, and Natalie Czech, in the temporal processes of Sigrid Sigurdsson, the appropriation of history practiced by Daniela Comani, Lia Perjovschi, and Rayyane Tabet, or in the collages conjoining current events and popular culture created by Isa Genzken and Robert Heinecken, as well as in the encyclopedic, material-based classification systems of Henrik Olesen and Joëlle Tuerlinckx.

Already during her lifetime, Hanne Darboven achieved fame as a museum artist, entering into the canon of Minimal and Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, to this day, she also retains her status as an artist extraordinaire, inspiring a young generation of artists in spite of—or precisely because of—the hermetic character of her work. On the one hand, Darboven’s oeuvre is defined by the contrast between a programmatic mechanization of aesthetic production procedures, and, on the other hand, by radical cross-references to the artist’s personal identity. This results in conflicting energies that appear to be incompatible with the self-image of conceptual art and its emphasis on rationalization since the 1960s: in employing her handwriting as a medium and assembling material-informed montages, Darboven is furthermore inserting a subjective ductus into her conceptual works, literally inscribing her own life-time, the span in which her works were written, into these: “am burgberg—heute… und keine worte mehr… und eine welt noch” (“at the burgberg—today… and no more words… and yet one more world”).

Finally, due to both the rational structure of her media-spanning, multi-layered works and her diverse spectrum of subject-related references to music, literature, and European cultural history, Hanne Darboven prefigures strategies and discourses of aesthetic knowledge production and mediation in current art.

With their obsessive nature and encyclopedic magnitude, Darboven’s visualizations of time and recent history, as well as the collection, selection, and rearrangement of knowledge in form of handwritten excerpts, photographic, literary, and journalistic documents of cultural history, bear witness to the artist’s attempt to counter the information flood and the alleged chaos of the (post-) modern world by creating an autonomous classification system and by placing herself in an individual framework of meaning.

The group exhibition “…and yet one more world” encompasses a broad spectrum of contemporary aesthetic strategies of addressing systems of knowledge and current events. These include autonomous recording and narrative systems, the investigation of temporal structures, and the material-based aesthetic and media-spanning conflation of personal time concepts and of contemporary history and current events.

Participating artists include:
Georges Adéagbo & Alfredo Jaar, Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Anna Artaker & Meike S. Gleim, Fiona Banner, Irma Blank, Heath Bunting, Banu Cennetoğlu, Alejandro Cesarco, Armin Chodzinski, Daniela Comani, Martin Creed, Natalie Czech, Hanne Darboven, Cevdet Erek, Isa Genzken, Flora Hauser, Robert Heinecken, Ydessa Hendeles, Channa Horwitz, Nick Koppenhagen, Tim Lee, Sol LeWitt, Lucy R. Lippard, Almir Mavignier, Jonathan Monk, Susan Morris, Michael Müller, Matt Mullican, Henrik Olesen, Ulrike Ottinger, Lia Perjovschi, Michael Riedel, Arno Schmidt, Barbara Schmidt Heins, Sigrid Sigurdsson, Fiete Stolte, Josef Strau, Rayyane Tabet, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Jorinde Voigt, Tris Vonna-Michell, Hannah Weiner, Lawrence Weiner

Curated by Miriam Schoofs (art historian, Berlin/Hamburg) and Katja Schroeder (artistic director, Kunsthaus Hamburg).