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to expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer: Artistic Practices around 1990
mumok Vienna 10 October to 24 January
At the time, in 1993, the exhibition 'Kontext Kunst' (Context Art) curated by Peter Weibel at the Neue Galerie im Künstlerhaus Graz in Austria garnered strong criticism - particularly from the late Texte zur Kunst co-founder and editor Stefan Germer in his 1995 text 'Unter Geiern' (Amongst the Vultures) - for its re-presentation of artistic practices that were in vogue during the early 1990s. Many of the artists who participated in that show, such as Fareed Armaly, Tom Burr, Clegg & Gutmann, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Louise Lawler, Regina Möller, Stephan Prina, Chirstopher Williams and Heimo Zobering, also feature in 'to expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer'. With a degree of historical distance from 'Kontext Kunst', as well as the exhibition 'temporary translation(s)' that took place a year later at Sammlung Schürmann, this vast exhibition is a meticulously well-researched survey of artistic activity from the recent past, hinged around the significance of 1990, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as a crucial year both politically and creatively in US-German relations. Whereas the 1980s were defined by a generation of postwar German painters, in the 1990s the city became a meeting place for changing notions of the Avant Garde on both sides of the Atlantic.
The exhibition primarily focuses on the feverish exchange between the US and West Germany, yet also includes key projects that originated in Vienna as well. As implied by the title, 'to expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer' considers how a nexus of artistic practices from a concentrated period dealt with issues of representation at a time when the exhibition was, for many in the show, the medium. To question the social function of their work, a plurality of art forms were deployed by artists, writers, collectives...