Sites of Sustainability: Pavilions, Manifestos and Crypts
Curator: Zdenka Badovinac
In the context of
Hello World. Revising a Collection.
28 April 2018 to 26 August 2018
Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin
On April 27, the exhibition Hello World is opening at the Hamburger Bahnhof- Museum für Gegenwart, part of the Berlin Nationalgalerie. It runs until August 26, 2018. Moderna galerija is participating in this exhibition (mostly) with works from its Arteast 2000+ collection.
The research and exhibition project has been funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, as a part of the initiative ‘Global Museum’, with the aim to critically rethink the collections in German museums under the current global conditions. The critique centers on the Western art canon and the fact that most works on view in German museums are Western European and North American. This is also the case in the Berlin Nationalgalerie, whose collection and relations to various cultural spaces are at the focus of the Hello World exhibition. How could we think a collection today, in our globalized time? To answer this question, the exhibition looks to the strong tradition of transnational artistic networks and intercultural exchange as they have evolved since late 19th century. The various possible connections are presented in thirteen separate narratives, the work of Nationalgalerie curators and five guest curators.
Hello World. Revising a Collection is a critical inquiry into the collection of the Nationalgalerie and its predominantly Western focus: What could the collection look like today, had an understanding characterised its concept of art, and consequently also its genesis, that was more open to the world? How might the canon and the art historical narratives themselves have changed through a widening and multiplication of perspectives? With these questions as starting points, the exhibition unfolds in 13 thematic chapters as a many-voiced collaboration of internal and external curators, encompassing the whole exhibition space of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin.
One of the chapters of the exhibition, Sites of Sustainability: Pavilions, Manifestos and Crypts, has been curated by Zdenka Badovinac. In addition to presenting mostly works from Moderna galerija’s Arteast 2000+ collection it includes also works from other public and private collections, most notably from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. The display foregrounds alternative models of artistic production, such as they developed in Eastern Europe in socialist times, in particular in the territory of former Yugoslavia. Between the 1950s and the 1990s, artists in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, and GDR devised various alternative models of artistic production, in particular as a performative aspect of their art. Rather than critically describing the existing conditions, they used their art to actually shape their conditions of work. Thus sites of sustainability can be understood as a kind of parallel infrastructure, built especially through work in local and international collectives and networks, through exhibitions in self-organized spaces, through samizdats, through parallel economies, and also through self-historicizing. This was art that built and maintained social relations and a critical understanding of the world.
Sites of sustainability are not characteristic only of art, since art always critically affects also its institutions (as long as they are open to alternative approaches). One of the main challenges museums face today how to participate with autonomy in global cultural networks, how to find or shape alternative distribution channels for contents, channels that will not only serve the most affluent and powerful global cultural spaces. In this sense, the Berlin exhibition features more than just works from the Arteast 2000+ collection, but also Moderna galerija and its Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova as an institution with a vision for the globalized world.
Curator: Zdenka Badovinac
Exhibition installation: Azra Akšamija
Assistent curator: Ana Mizerit
Sellection of New Tendencies and Nationalgalerie collection: Darko Fritz
Sellection of Grupa šestorice: Branka Stipančić
Artists:
Collective Actions (Andrei Monastyrski)
Walter de Maria
EXAT 51 (Bernardo Bernardi, Ivan Picelj, Zvonimir Radić, Božidar Rašica, Vjenceslav Richter, Aleksandar Srnec)
György Galántai
Gorgona (Josip Vaništa)
Grupa šestorice autora (Gruppe der sechs Künstler / Group of six artists) (Boris Demur, Željko Jerman, Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Fedor Vučemilović)
Julije Knifer
Jaroslaw Kozlowski
Kazimir Malevich
Museum of American Art (Berlin) (Christa Bohme, Bernhard Franke, A.R. Penck, Via Lewandowsky)
Neue Slowenische Kunst (IRWIN, Laibach, Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre)
New Tendencies International Movement (Marc Adrian, Giovanni Antonio Costa artist group Gruppo N, Gianni Colombo, artist group Gruppo T, Compos 68, Charles Csury, Juraj Dobrović, Piero Dorazio, Willam Allan Fetter, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Hiroshi Kawano, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Heinz Mack , Piero Manzoni, Manfred Mohr, François Morellet, artist group GRAV, Frieder Nake, Ivan Picelj, Vjenčeslav Richter, Bridget Riley, Manfred Robert Schroeder, Zdeněk Sýkora, Goran Trbuljak, Edvard Zajec)
OHO Group (Milenko Matanović, David Nez, Marko Pogačnik, Andraž Šalamun)
Marko Sančanin Đurovski
Mladen Stilinović
Josip Vaništa
Dušan Vukotić
Vadim Zakharov
