Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria, 15.03.–09.10.2024
Nilbar Güreş, BILINMEYEN SPORLAR (KOMPOZIT) / UNKNOWN SPORTS (KOMPOSIT), 2009
Play is a special way of experiencing the world. It is a metaphor for social coexistence and a driver of cultural transformation. Enjoyable play helps us discover ourselves, our individual qualities, and abilities. Free play, meanwhile, can often turn bitterly serious. Playful contests let us experience social cooperation and competition. We learn how rules and systems operate and what it means to bend and break them.
The exhibition Playing Rules! centers on the theme of play in art. From nature, the body, and sport to communication and media imagery, these are just some of the areas artists explore through play, transforming them by way of interaction and improvisation. They show how art uses imagination to expand the limits of the possible and the potential of play in representing and, not infrequently, subverting social relationships.
With works by Marc Adrian, Josef Bauer, VALIE EXPORT, Harun Farocki, Nilbar Güreş, Hans Haacke, [...]
Hugo Canoilas, Carved Sea Shell, 2021, high fluid acrylic on linen
In the first edition of Space Uncurated, MLZ Art Dep and Wiener Art Foundation present, in collaboration with Martin Janda Gallery in Vienna, a dialogue between the artists Nilbar Güreş, Turkish of Kurdish origin, and the Portuguese artist Hugo Canoilas. The depths of the ocean, a generating place unknown to our eyes, is the starting point for Hugo Canoilas in his search for a new pictorial space. In the exhibition 'At the extremes of good and evil' (Mumok, Vienna, 2020) Canoilas shows us a unique, living and ephemeral gesture. The painting, angled horizontally on the floor, offers a change of perspective that can also be understood metaphorically as a deviation of social experience and behaviour. In 2022, Hugo Canoilas had a solo exhibition entitled 'Sculptured in darkness' at Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisboa. Created for the 31st Biennal of São Paulo, Wildness is an iconic photographic work that captures [...]
MAK Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria, 13.12.2023–20.05.2024
Nilbar Güreş, Red, Old Woman, Yellow, Black Eyes, Brown, Pride Belt, Blue, Drilled Ears, Silver, Carpet Seeds, Blue, Teenage Acne, 2014, installation, fabric, indigenous skirts, Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna
HARD/SOFT: Textiles and Ceramics in Contemporary Art brings together two seemingly contrasting materials.
While textiles are associated with warmth and flexibility, ceramics formed from soft clay radiate a cool fragility. Yet both media bring to life an aesthetic language that shifts between hard, soft, unwieldy, and flowing. The materials, shapes, and significance of the selected works reveal a broad spectrum of ambiguity, vagueness, and simultaneity.
The exhibition showcases the work of around 40 artists from Austria and all over the globe, whose artistic practice draws on craft techniques such as embroidery, knotting, and weaving, as well as sculpting, wedging, and firing. The sculptures, installations, and painted works, which also include embroidered images, patchworks, and tapestries, show a vast range of artistic and interdisciplinary approaches that combine visual and applied arts, architecture, music, and digital space. These pieces offer an insight [...]
Nilbar Güreş, SOYUNMA / UNDRESSING, 2006, HD Single channel video
With the reopening of the Wien Museum at Karlsplatz, the musa returns as an exhibition venue for contemporary art. The first show continues the successful series that has probed the City of Vienna’s contemporary art collection. After exhibitions on the decades of the 1950s to the 1990s, this time the focus lies on contributions from the 2000s.
Bye-bye Confidence — the first decade of the new century: the sense of a new beginning after the millennium was abruptly shattered by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Artists dealt with themes such as migration, global warming, monuments and memory, and aesthetics and economics. The observation of one's own body was prominent as well, encouraged by the rise of smartphones along with the consequent selfie cult. Photographers trained their lenses on urban non-sites, while painters pulled off yet another decade of formal diversity.
Curators 2000s-Exhibition: Robert Adrian X, Irene Andessner, Anna Artaker, [...]