Nilbar Güreş, LOVERS, 2011, genähte Textilien, Halskette, Foto: 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 [...]

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, Farbfotografien

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 [...]

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

Vielleicht haben Sie es selbst schon einmal erlebt: Eine Situation war derart schmerzhaft und unerträglich, dass Sie in unkontrolliertes Gelächter ausgebrochen sind. Ein Schutzmechanismus der Psyche, der auf unsere Umgebung grotesk und unangemessen wirken mag, jedoch greift, um uns zumindest kurzzeitig vor der schieren Verzweiflung zu bewahren. 

Die Gruppenausstellung Bliss, bliss, bliss orientiert sich an dem Motiv eines solchen bizarren Lachens. Angesichts der Inflation apokalyptischer Szenarien, der Realität von Kriegen und Terror und einer Klimakrise, die ungehindert eskaliert, beleuchtet die Schau bewusste und unbewusste Bewältigungsmechanismen der Psyche. Welche Auswirkungen hat die Erfahrung einer „schwindenden Welt“ auf die Art und Weise, wie wir fühlen, begehren, uns zu uns selbst und anderen in Beziehung setzen? 

Sechs Künstler*innen spüren Fragen wie dieser aus persönlicher [...]

Nilbar Güreş, BILINMEYEN SPORLAR (KOMPOZIT) / UNKNOWN SPORTS (KOMPOSIT), 2009

Das Spiel ist eine besondere Form der Welterfahrung. Es ist eine Metapher für das gesellschaftliche Zusammenleben, aber auch ein Motor für kulturellen Wandel. Im lustvollen Spiel entdecken wir uns selbst, unsere individuellen Eigenschaften und Fähigkeiten. Andererseits schlägt das freie Spiel oft in bitteren Ernst um. Im spielerischen Wettkampf erleben wir das soziale Mit- und Gegeneinander. Wir lernen, wie Regeln und Systeme funktionieren und was es heißt, sie zu brechen und zu durchkreuzen.

Die Ausstellung Spielen heißt verändern! widmet sich dem Spieltrieb in der Kunst. Von Natur, Körper und Sport bis hin zu Kommunikation und Medienbildern: Dies sind nur einige der Bereiche, die Künstler:innen spielerisch erkunden und durch Formen der Improvisation und Interaktion verwandeln. Sie zeigen, wie Kunst fantasievoll die Grenzen des Denkbaren erweitert und die Möglichkeiten des Spiels nutzt, um [...]