VALIE EXPORT: Research – Archive – Oeuvre / Alicja Kwade: „Being ...“

VALIE EXPORT. Research – Archive – Oeuvre
Curator: Sabine Folie

VALIE EXPORT is considered one of the most important artists working in the fields of conceptual media art, performance art and film. She continues to have an ongoing influence on generations of up-and-coming artists with her feminist and media-critical works. Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) is presenting VALIE EXPORT in a first representative exhibition of works and archival materials at a German institution in 15 years.

From the beginning of her career, EXPORT has been addressing the issues of an increasingly mediatized society and questioning its functions, guiding principles and mechanisms of communication. The work complexes presented at the n.b.k. stem from five decades and illustrate the diversity of subjects in VALIE EXPORT’s oeuvre. They range from dealing with society‘s thinking and acting in dichotomies like culture / nature or masculine / feminine, to locating the human and above all female subject in the world—within a (constructed) social body that finds it materialization, among other things, in the built city. How architecture, technologies and media (de)form people is the central focus of research in this process. As a result, archival materials and works from the work complex of research on culture and nature from the 1970s are shown as well as those works that focus on the writing subject that constitutes itself in script. In photographs, films and installations from the 1980s and 1990s the artist has been exploring a self that has been fragmented and alienated in the digital age. By creating allegorical images new perspectives are explored, analyzed and exhausted. The exhibition provides insight into VALIE EXPORT’s working process, looks at her practice of questioning space, the body and media, and underlines the research quality of the artistic process.

Together with the artist, the curator Sabine Folie developed an exhibition that—after its first presentation at the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz in 2017—will now be shown in an expanded form under the title VALIE EXPORT. Research – Archive – Oeuvre at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Here, the exhibition includes important works by the artist that in a unique way document EXPORT’s creative process and combines them with archival material such as sketches, letters, photos and notes. The archival material comes from the artist‘s pre-mortem bequest, which is being researched under the direction of Sabine Folie at the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz since November 2017 and is accessible there to an interested public.
 

Public Program

Saturday, June 9, 2018, 7pm
Artist Talk
with VALIE EXPORT, moderated by Sabine Folie (director VALIE EXPORT Center Linz)
In German language

Thursday, June 28, 2018, 7pm
Performative Strategien und das Archiv (Performative Strategies and the Archive)
Panel discussion with Yilmaz Dziewior (art historian and curator, director Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and Sigrid Adorf (professor for contemporary art and culture analysis, Zurich University of the Arts), moderated by Bettina Knaup (curator, Berlin and London)
In German language

Sunday, August 12, 2018, 8pm
Peaches
Performance

Admission free for all events


n.b.k. Showroom
Alicja Kwade
„Being ...“
Exhibition concept: René Block

In her sculptures, installations, and video works, Alicja Kwade repeatedly deals with the relationship between fiction and reality. Her works are formal attempts to explain scientific or philosophical phenomena and shed light on our perception of reality as well as on social conventions. Kwade works with traits of material, modes of representation and expectations associated with them as well as on notions of time and space.

For her series of works “Being...,” presented at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Kwade has intensively explored letters from both real and fictional persons. Since 2006, she has been meticulously copying selected documents by hand, over and over again, thus adopting new handwritings. The copies she made in this way were finally given to certified graphologists. The experts carried out a character analysis based on the handwriting and made statements on the personality of the alleged authors, which are recorded in various reports and presented by Kwade together with the copies of the letters. Kwade’s experiment equally puts the psychodiagnostic procedure and its source material to the test and refers to a play with identities as it is common in a world shaped by the media: different personalities overlap, original and construct can no longer be distinguished.