Program preview 2017

Harun Farocki: Counter-Music
February 3–May 28, 2017
Harun Farocki (1944–2014) was a seminal figure amongst the filmmakers and intellectuals that emerged from the highly-charged political debates in Europe at the end of the 1960s. His oeuvre constitutes an archaeology of the political economy of media and images that question the efficacy and validity of the moving image as a mode of documentation and analysis.

Emerging from within this vast body of work that combines humanist, anarchic, and aesthetic militancy Harun Farocki: Counter-Music explores the filmmaker’s continual analysis of shifting modes of labor, production, and consumption. Indeed, current disenchantments with labor practices across the world, combined with the mass displacement of workers which have taken place under the guise of globalization have added renewed urgency and energy to Farocki’s incisive reflections on the nature of human and social agency.

Organized in partnership with Sammlung Goetz.
 

FMP: The Living Music
March 10–August 20, 2017
The record label and improvisational music production platform Free Music Production (FMP) was founded in West Berlin in 1968. Its radically expansive focus on contemporary improvisational music and avant-garde jazz was a global undertaking from the beginning. Cutting across diverse musical and cultural practices, FMP invited musicians and composers to explore a range of performance possibilities, from its renowned recordings to concerts, festivals (Total Music Meeting) to interdisciplinary workshops (Workshop Freie Musik), and exhibitions. With a catalogue of more than 500 published recordings, countless concerts, more than 100 festivals, and an archive of films, photographs, posters and other graphic work, FMP represents a wholly unique example of lasting artistic radicality that challenges previous norms of collective practice.

Curated by Markus Müller.
The exhibition is a cooperation with Goethe-Institut and made possible with major funding by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
 

Thomas Struth: Figure
May 5–September 17, 2017
This major exhibition of the renowned German photographer Thomas Struth (born 1954), presents a comprehensive survey of his genre-defining oeuvre. Covering four decades of work and every phase of his career, the exhibition focuses especially on the aspect of Struth’s social interests which represent the important forces of his internationally influential artistic development. With more than 120 works, this exhibition is the largest survey of his artistic career to date. It brings together for the first time never-before shown early works and collected research material drawn from his archive which elucidate the far-reaching and longstanding ideas behind the different works and demonstrate the process of his artistic translation up to the perfection of the image.

Curated by Thomas Weski.
The exhibition is made possible with major funding by the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, Munich.
 

Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi
June 23, 2017–January 7, 2018
In his exceptional career, which now spans six decades, Frank Bowling (*1934) has created some of the most ambitious and remarkable paintings of the British postwar period. Decisive for Bowling’s artistic maturity, however, was his move in 1966 from London to New York, where he encountered diverse and ambitious abstract painting. In the mid-1960s, when the language of abstraction seemed to have lost its hold in post-war painting, Bowling began to experiment with idioms of the abstract picturesque. With rich patches of paint, viscous drips, modulated washes, coagulated pourings, hurtling streaks, stamped stencils, and printed silkscreens, he devoted himself to a painting of mediated opulence, tranquil contemplation, and of great power and aesthetic clarity.

Curated by Okwui Enwezor, with Anna Schneider.
 

Blind Faith: Between the Visceral and the Cognitive in Contemporary Art
October 20, 2017–February 18, 2018
Scrambled cartographies, unpredictable ecological developments, economic instability, the current migrant crisis, and terrorism are just some of the developments that have thrown the global order into question. In the face of these uncertainties empirical evidence, scientific fact, and long-accepted histories are losing currency. But how are contemporary artists navigating and negotiating the unsteady terrain presented by this epistemological turn? Blind Faith, with its invocations of systems of belief, demonstrates how a new generation of international artists is reverting to the mind and body as sites of investigation within the binary of truth and falsehood. By mapping the space between the carnal and the cognitive, the show traces how the fluidity of the boundary between the self and other, and the relativization of subjecthood and objectification are informing contemporary artistic models. Engaging the visceral and the liminal and exploring ideas of sovereignty and resonance, Blind Faith assembles over 25 artists who deploy a variety of media in order to demarcate the potential of the corporeal and recode accepted states of being.

Curated by Julienne Lorz, Daniel Milnes and Anna Schneider.
 

DER ÖFFENTLICHKEIT—Von den Freunden Haus der Kunst: Sarah Sze
Haus der Kunst is proud to present Sarah Sze (*1969) as the upcoming artist for the annual commission dedicated to the Middle Hall of the building with the support and collaboration of the museum’s Gesellschaft der Freunde. Sze’s complex structures, sometimes fragile and often growing boundless into space seem to defy gravity. Resembling scientific apparatuses they try to organize and quantify the universe bringing into focus a massive constellation of tightly linked elements that cohere into one explosive sculptural mass.

Curated by Okwui Enwezor.

In 2017 Oscar Murillo (*1986) and Polina Kanis (*1985) will be the next artists to realize a new project for the seventh and eighth iteration of the Capsule exhibition series. Furthermore a new display in the Archive Gallery will continue the site-specific Interventions into Architecture, with the inauguration of an unrealized proposal by Ian Hamilton Finlay across the span of the museum’s 22 monumental columns. The ongoing cooperation with Sammlung Goetz, featuring video and media art will continue with its tenth edition.

Press contact:
Elena Heitsch
presse [​at​] hausderkunst.de