Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions & Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Kunsthalle Bern, we will draw a line from the past to the present. To move forward into the future, one must look back at one’s own history. Groundbreaking exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bern led to substantial changes in the conception of exhibition formats and the development of curatorial programs. The Kunsthalle Bern is the cradle of the model of the curator-as-auteur who develops a “narrative.” This development does not culminate at the Kunsthalle, but continues to evolve with changing generations, parameters and value judgements.

At midyear, we will address one of the Kunsthalle’s most celebrated eras, when it turned 50. In societal terms, the period around the uprisings of 1968 was an historical moment favorable to the development of new models. Against this backdrop, Bern native Harald Szeemann (1933-2005) took exhibition-making in unprecedented directions as director of the Kunsthalle from 1961 to 1969, inventing groundbreaking curatorial models. With shows like Science Fiction (1968) or his revolutionary Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969), he firmly inscribed himself in the history of 20th century art and brought worldwide recognition to the Kunsthalle Bern. Later, as director of documenta 5 (1972) and freelance curator of his “Agentur für geistige Gastarbeit” and “Museum of Obsessions,” Szeemann conceived further exhibitions that underpinned his reputation as the inventor of contemporary curating.

In 2011 the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles acquired the exhibition organizer and obsessive collector’s enormous estate, which had accumulated within the 2,700 square meters of the Fabbrica Rosa in Ticino where he lived and worked at the end of his life. Embarking on an extremely elaborate cataloging process, the GRI inventoried five decades’ worth of correspondence, objects, and publications documenting Szeemann’s intellectual universe, his research, plans and projects, and his international network. To introduce the work of the curator to a broad public for the first time, the GRI presented two interconnected shows in Los Angeles in February of this year. The exhibition Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions was mounted at the GRI and Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us (1974), one of the most personal and radical shows Szeemann curated, was restaged at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (ICA LA).

The international tour of the exhibition starts at the Kunsthalle Bern, the birthplace of Szeemann’s career and, in hindsight, where one finds the nucleus of his subsequent work. Subsequent tour venues include the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin and the Swiss Institute, New York.

Please see website for full text.

For further information and image requests, please contact Press Kunsthalle Bern.

These exhibitions have been organized by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Bern (Director: Valérie Knoll).

Curated by Glenn Phillips and Philipp Kaiser, with Doris Chon and Pietro Rigolo.