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Landesmuseum Joanneum

Volksgarten
Politics of Belonging
Curators: Adam Budak, Peter Pakesch,
Katia Schurl

Opening: Saturday, September 22, 2007, 11am
September 22, 2007 - January 13, 2008
Tue - Sun 10am-6pm

Kunsthaus Graz am
Landesmuseum Joanneum
Lendkai 1, A–8020 Graz

T +43-316/8017-9200, F -9212
info@kunsthausgraz.at

http://www.kunsthausgraz.at

In a world of hysterically accelerated globalisation, the issues of hyper-locality and the community-generated space are getting on a particular urgency. Such urgency is at the centre of the exhibition "Volksgarten. Politics of Belonging" which aims at portraying two districts of the micro-city organism of Graz, Lend and Gries, in the nearest neighbourhood of Kunsthaus Graz, on a division line between two distinctive and diversified parts of the city. The Volksgarten — as a title concept — implicates an abstract and a concrete site of an open and democratic space where a variety of identities is being shaped and consequently negotiated. Ethnically complex, multicultural and socially diverse, Lend and Gries function as a metaphor of urban, political, cultural and national transformations. Geometry of difference brought in by a dense population of immigrants, visible signs of economic failure, thus generated social frustration and division constitute the everyday-li
fe aspects of newly born and adapted economies. The exhibition investigates identification systems and strategies of belonging within given hybrid neighbourhoods and communities. What are the forms of co-habitation? How social utopias are being constructed? What are the possible scenarios of collective and communal life? How (public) intimacy endures in the landscape of group-like common-life impositions and memberships? Volksgarten is a playground where a complex production of social space occurs: here, the legality and legitimacy of space are tested; here, too, space’s accessibility is challenged through a dense network of multiply human relations on the crossway of local and global economies. Last but not least, this exhibition explores the role of an art institution, such as Kunsthaus Graz and its landmark architecture (designed by star architects, Peter Cook and Colin Fournier) as a possible and potential catalyst for changes and revitalisation of the troubled districts. This very architecture had been baptized by the architects with a nickname "Friendly Alien". Such oscillation between estrangement and friendliness marks not only the formal solutions for the Kunsthaus’ architecture; it also describes very well its psychology and the external resonance.

Following Jean-Luc Nancy’s elaborations of community and his grammar of "with", the artists of this exhibition perform a desire to rework or rather unwork the very construct of the (real or imaginative) community as the dominant Western political formation, founded upon an exclusionary myth of national, rational or religious unity in order to accommodate more inclusive and plural forms of Being-in-common and of dwelling together in the world. Here, there is a collection of belongings as mosaics of "with": the very properties that constitute the identity (folds of proximity and distance) but also the constructions (modulations and tensions of proximity and distance) that shape their politics and mode of operating.

The Swiss art collective, airline is setting up a place of encounter (airtrain, 2007) in the Grazer Volksgarten, inviting visitors to take part in a variety of activities and seeking lively interaction with the local residents. Airline is taking on a journey into a life of real communities, elaborating (interdisciplinary) agenda of intercultural practice and mentality’s training for an open guesthouse where hospitality and authenticity of a minimal gesture operate beyond any particular politics of belonging. Here, at the airtrain station in the Volksgarten, there is a construction site of a ready-made belonging, ephemeral in its existence, though elemental in its essence, half-way utopian though haptic too. The Greek artist, Maria Papadimitriou is assembling an orchestra composed of immigrants (Volksgarten Orchestra, 2007), which will premiere at the Grazer Concert Hall, Orpheum on the day after the exhibition opening. The immigrants’ polyphony of diverse musical styles, trad
itions, voices, sounds, instruments, etc. is a convincing expression of possibility of a new language, a new communication, opening up new encounters, waking up (social and individual) potentialities. Meanwhile, the Austrian artistic duo Johanna and Helmut Kandl take the happiness of the people of Lend and Gries as their theme. Brightly coloured balloons will be handed out, inscribed in 15 different languages with a bold assertion: We will live here and be happy, 2007. Such is Kandl’s response to the exhibition’s topic of belonging and a specific ethnic complexity of Lend and Gries: a self-imposed statement of a peculiar simplicity, if not elemental sincere obviousness – a necessity of happiness as a basic and sufficient condition of life, its sense, feeling and quality, in a place which due to various reasons happened to become your (second) home.

In the exhibition space of the Kunsthaus Graz, the theme of living together is dealt with at a general level. Sharon Lockhart’s field-works research both the mechanisms of collectivity and the subjectivity of an individual, conditioned by the communities’ belonging and identification. Conceived in a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Lockhart’s film, "Pine Flat" is the artist’s first project to focus on a community in her native country, the United States. In a typical for her, formally concise but intimate, manner, the artist traces and records the contemporary rural life with a particular attention paid to the interactions and behaviour of the local community’s children, engaged in everyday activities played out in a picturesque natural landscape immersed in seasonal changes. "Pine Flat" is Lockhart’s most sincere to date and almost autobiographical "collective journey". The Turkish artist, Özlem Sula
k revisits the biography of her own family in order to depict the poignancy of 20th century political and social history. Her video work “Granny” is a private, captivating confession of those who survived a true gehenna of European forced migration and ethnic relocation. Realized for the exhibition “Volksgarten”, Thomas Hirschhorn’s sculpture “Concept-Car” is a journey into the artist’s own identity and its rich network of connections and conceptual itineraries. “Who am I? Where do I stand? What is my belief?” asks the artist in a labyrinthine diagram which serves as an engine of his vehicle of concepts and precious possessions. Here is the archive of private mythology, intellectual skeleton of artist’s identity and of his dense work between distinctive subjectivity and external influence. As a catalogue of references and tools, “Concept Car” focuses on the understanding of belonging(s) as an intellectual property thus provides the viewer with a unique insight into the artist’s atelier and the constitutive production process. Stephen Willats’ two series from the end of the 70s, “Sorting Out Other People’s Lives” (1978) and “A Conflict of Identities” (1979) aim at weaving the complex fabrics of belonging on the crossway of personal desire and communal expectation and thus developing new codes for social structure and the role of an individual.

Participating artists: Airline / Switzerland, Pawel Althamer / Poland, Bik van der Pol / Holland, Maria Papadimitriou / Greece, Daniel Roth / Germany, Thomas Hirschhorn / Switzerland, Manfred Willmann / Austria, Los Carpinteros / Cuba, Ozlem Sulak / Turkey, Helmut & Johanna Kandl / Austria, Absalon / Israel, Gordon Matta-Clark / USA, Stephen Willats / UK, Sharon Lockhart / USA, Pierre Huyghe / France, Jean-Luc Moulene / France, resanita / Austria.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue which contains text contributions by Nira Yuval Davis, Suzana Milevska, Katia Schurl, Sissi Tax, Özlem Sulak, Bik Van der Pol, Helmut Konrad, Christian Kravagna, Adam Budak, Thomas Hirschhorn, Stephen Willats as well as an introduction by Peter Pakesch and a rich visual material, related to the art works on view and the special projects developed in collaboration with the local community.

“Volksgarten. Politics of Belonging” includes a programme of the following events:

Saturday, Sept 22, 2007
3pm: Talks with Thomas Hirschhorn and Stephen Willats, Space04
From 5pm: Picnic in the Volksgarten (Der Pavillion)

Sunday, Sept 23, 2007/7pm, Orpheum Graz/Concert
Maria Papadimitriou: Volksgarten Orchestra

Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007/7pm, Space04/Lectures
Suzana Milevska: The Phantasm of Belonging
Nira Yuval-Davis: The Politics of Belonging and the
Construction of Boundaries

Tuesday, Oct 9, 2007/8.30pm, augartenkino kiz//Film Screening
Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat

Tuesday, Nov 27, 2007/7pm, Space04/Lecture
Rainer Münz: Too Many People?

Friday, Dec 7, 2007/10am–2am, Space04/Symposium
Stories — Places — Identities

The exhibition has been realized in collaboration with the Festival Styrian Autumn

For more information go to: http://www.kunsthausgraz.at

Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Rosso. The Transient Form
September 22, 2007 - January 6, 2008
Curated by: Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci

Peggy Guggenheim Collection
701 Dorsoduro
30123 Venice
ITALY

phone +39 041 2405411
fax +39 041 5206885
email info@guggenheim-venice.it

Opening hours: daily 10 am to 6 pm
(closed on Tuesday and December 25)

http://www.guggenheim-venice.it

"Those who know some of Rosso’s wonderful waxes reminiscent of arts from lost civilisations, purged sensations, precious fragments that appear to rise up from violated tombs, from destroyed and burnt cities, from collapsed palaces…"

Mario Marasso, "Il Marzocco", 23 October 1904

From 22 September 2007 to 6 January 2008 the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is showing ROSSO: THE TRANSIENT FORM. The exhibition, curated by Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, traces the rediscovery of the complex contemporary aesthetics of Medardo Rosso through sculptures, waxes, plasters, bronzes, photos and previously unseen documents. The project has been realised in association with the Museo and Archivio Medardo Rosso in Barzio (Lecco), which houses the entire legacy of the sculptor’s works and archive, bequeathed in its entirety to his great-granddaughter, Danila Marsure Rosso.

Rosso (Turin, 1858 - Milan, 1928) is a renowned artist, widely studied and firmly consolidated in the European scene of late 19th-century sculpture as a precursor of modernity. And yet Rosso remains unknown for the most significant part of his production. The systematic and detailed scrutiny of documents, papers and letters from the archive, instigated by Danila Marsure Rosso a few years ago and carried out by Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, with further research in Italy and abroad, has opened new unexpected horizons that go against the perceived image of the ‘Scapigliatura’–Impressionist sculptor. By nature Rosso was a hidden talent: he skilfully concealed all of his photographic work, he exhibited his most treasured works, such as Madame X or Yvette Guilbert, more than fifteen years after their creation and, like Marcel Duchamp, destroyed all of his correspondence at the end of his life. From the very start of his career he cleverly manipulated his biography, contributing
to the definition of an unequivocal view of his art accepted unquestioningly by historiography to the extent that the entire 20th-century output of his creative energy has remained unheard of until now.

The exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection aims to support the huge endeavour of restoring the sculptor to the complexity of his past, making not only the general public and scholars, but also the contemporary art world, aware of him as a participant of the emerging panorama, helping them find in Rosso’s artistic practices unimagined consonances and opportunities for reflection. The decision to exhibit a selection of 24 documented sculptures, including Madame X (wax on plaster, 1896), Yvette Guilbert (glazed plaster, 1895), La Rieuse (wax, 1890) and Bambino malato (wax, 1889), reveals the complex task of dating and reconstructing Rosso’s artistic production. Time was of little consequence to Rosso: sometimes the artist himself would get the dates of his works muddled up, as though for him the work were a fluid thing that would last a lifetime in sculpture or in photography.

On a specifically historiographic level, a lot of new information has emerged that will put an end to debated questions in the world of 20th-century art, such as the dating of Madame X; events will be clarified, such as the fate of Impressione d’omnibus, which had a very different end to that of its destruction on a journey to Venice in 1887, or the fate of the large Paris la Nuit plaster. Furthermore, his photographic work is given prominent space in the exhibition, with almost 100 photos coming from the Archivio Rosso, complementing Paola Mola’s latest work Rosso: Trasferimenti, which considers the question, central in contemporary art, of the relationship between Sculpture and Photography.

The most important premise of this exhibition is to clarify the aesthetic quality of Rosso’s production with the presentation of incontrovertibly signature works, whose history will be reconstructed from their conception, drawing on the studies and research carried out for the Catalogo dell’opera documentata backed by the Archivio Rosso and in an advanced stage of development. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, published by SKIRA, Milan.

The exhibition is made possible by CORRIERE DELLA SERA and REGIONE DEL VENETO. A special thank to Art Forum Wurth.

Press Office:
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Tel. +39 0412405404; press@guggenheim-venice.it

For more information go to: http://www.guggenheim-venice.it