Nilbar Güres, Ergen Odasi / Adolescent Room, 2014, textile colour, textile, pearls, embroidery on red fabric, Photo: Markus Wörgötter

On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein, the main shareholder of the Vienna Insurance Group, Unknown Familiars brings together all six collections of the Group, which encounter each other, their different focuses and histories of development, for the first time. It is in this regard that they are unknown familiars – related, though with never having met before. The collections now complement each other in a precise selection of works, the presentation of which occupies an entire floor of the Leopold Museum, comprising over two hundred works of various genres from different periods. Young, contemporary art meets the modernism of the interwar period; the avant-garde of the 1970s meets contemporary Austrian positions. Starting out from the collection of the Czech Kooperativa – represented with a selection of works from the period from 1900 to 1950 – a network of thematic and stylistic references [...]

Nilbar Güreş, LOVERS, 2011, needled fabrics, necklace, Photo: Stephan Baumann

Deutsche Telekom is the donor of an extensive collection of Eastern European art created over the last two decades. The collection was founded in 2010 and is based in Bonn. The GHMP has also managed to assemble a rather large collection of contemporary art from the 1990s to the present day over the past ten years. Contrary to the initial proposal by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher, the curators of the collection, to exhibit a selection from this remarkable collection, we have decided after mutual discussions to opt for a more active collaboration between our institutions. In the forthcoming project, we present a comparison of the two collecting approaches and attempt to confront the artists and their themes from our side and theirs. We also turn our attention to what both institutions reflect or pursue in their collecting strategies.

Deutsche Telekom works with the entire Eastern European area, while Czech artists are only a minority [...]

Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck in collaboration with Media Farzin, Mobile for the Hotel Ávila, 1939-1942 and The Larger Picture, 1939-1942. From the series 'Modern Entanglements, U.S. Interventions', 2006-2009, 2 C-prints, mock construction plan of Calder's mobile (print on paper), wall label with narrative text

Exploratory and forward-looking, the programme of temporary exhibitions continues to focus on the processes by which contemporary identities and bodies are constructed, in an attempt to reflect on reality and, ultimately, to propose new scenarios and new ways of inhabiting the world. It is in this context that MAC VAL is hosting the fourth episode of the ‘Humain Autonome’ touring project, curated by Marianne Derrien, Sarah Ihler-Meyer and Salim Santa Lucia.
Car, crate, sleeper, tank, jalopy, banger, wheels – the automobile is a paradoxical object. While some adore it, others condemn it. It is, at the very least, an ambiguous symbol, the cause and symptom of many of the crises we are going through (economic, societal, climatic, philosophical). Facilitating the movement of bodies and goods, exploration but also conquest, an instrument both of freedom and control, its use has shaped landscapes, bodies and minds. As the focus of many economic [...]

Július Koller, U.F.O.-nautická Kultúrna Situácia 1.,2.,3. (U.F.O.), 2002, colour photographs

Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s is a survey of experimental art made by almost 100 artists from six Central-Eastern European nations, including East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. The exhibition traces how a generation of artists with distinct experiences of locally specific state-sanctioned control embraced experimentation and interdisciplinary practices to confront at times harsh conditions of everyday life, while circumventing and eluding the very systems that sought to surveil and silence them.

The exhibition features rarely seen and newly reconstructed works. It draws on the visual arts, performance, music, and material culture to demonstrate the conceptual and formal innovation practiced by Eastern Bloc artists of the era, who were daily forced to negotiate and adapt their artistic practices within societies that enforced restrictions on how art could be produced, circulated, [...]

Asier Mendizabal

It comes as a surprise to the non-Portuguese speaker that the word normally used for chain is corrente, current. There is something counter-intuitive in this idea of displacement which, in turn, denotes a displacement in language itself. It is surprising that an image that evokes subjection, that even symbolizes generic concepts such as oppression or slavery and that makes one imagine the impediment to something or someone moving, would share its name with that which flows, with that which runs. And it denotes a displacement of language itself, as I say, because it is easy to reconstruct, backwards, the chain of phonemes that in their progressive transformation (sound shift, linguists call it) form its etymology up to the Latin currere and, from there to the voice*kurs in Pre-Indo-European, both naming the simple act of running. The displacement of the sounds made into words along languages and times, takes us, reversing the [...]

Chin Tsao, Foreign fine girls, how low you can go?, 2019

Perhaps you have experienced it yourself before: A situation was so painful and unbearable that you burst out laughing uncontrollably. It is a defense mechanism of the mind that may seem grotesque and even inappropriate to those around us, but its function is to protect us from feelings of sheer despair, if only at least for a short time.

The group exhibition Bliss, bliss, bliss is guided by the theme of such bizarre laughter. Against the backdrop of an increase in apocalyptic scenarios, the persistence of wars and terror as well as an unimpeded climate crisis that is only escalating further, the show examines conscious and unconscious coping mechanisms of the mind. What impact does the experience of a "declining world" have on the way we feel, desire and relate to ourselves and to others?

Six artists engage with questions like these from a personal as well as societal perspective, exploring moments of ecstasy, desire and excess. Their works show [...]