Artists & Agents

From October 26, 2019, the HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein) will be showing the extensively researched international group exhibition Artists & Agents - Performance Art and Secret Services at the Dortmunder U. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the exhibition highlights the interaction between secret services and performance art—an art form that was considered most dangerous by the single-party dictatorships of Eastern Europe. In order to effectively infiltrate the art scenes and ultimately "decompose" and "liquidate" them, the infiltrating agents in some cases had to "perform" and become "artists" themselves.

In addition to a wealth of file material, the HMKV will present numerous works by performance artists confronting their own files, as well as more recent artistic positions that deal with the intersection of art and secret services, including some from beyond Eastern Europe. Artists & Agents presents numerous examples of artistic subversion as well as hitherto unknown cases of secret service infiltration of the art scene by agents, presenting materials some of which have never been shown before. Recent works show that the issue of the increasing use of secret service methods in today’s politics and everyday life is highly topical.

Artists & Agents – Performance Art and Secret Services 

An exhibition by the HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein), Dortmund in cooperation with the Slavic Department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Curated by Inke Arns, Kata Krasznahorkai and Sylvia Sasse

Artists: Alexandru (Sándor) Antik (RO), Tina Bara & Alba D'Urbano (DE), Kurt Buchwald (DE), Károly Elekes / Árpád Nagy / MAMŰ group (RO), György Galántai / Artpool (HU), Ion Grigorescu (RO), Sanja Iveković (HR), Voluspa Jarpa (CL), Jens Klein (DE), Daniel Knorr (RO/DE), Csilla Könczei (RO), Korpys/Löffler (DE), Jiří Kovanda (CZ), Jill Magid (US), Simon Menner (DE), Arwed Messmer (DE), Clara Mosch (DE), Orange Alternative (PL), Peng! Collective (DE), Józef Robakowski (PL), Cornelia Schleime (DE), Nedko Solakov (BG), Gabriele Stötzer (DE), Tamás St.Turba (NETRAF-agent) / Gábor Altorjay (HU)

With files from Politische Polizei, Switzerland, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), GDR, Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB), Polish People’s Republic, Štátní bezpečnost (ŠB), ČSSR, Komitet gosudarstvennoj bezopasnosti (KGB), USSR, Belügyminisztérium (BM), Hungarian People’s Republic, Securitate, Socialist Republic of Romania, Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), Chile, Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD), the Netherlands, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany

Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and by the European Research Council (ERC) in the framework of the project "Performance Art in Eastern Europe 1950-1990. History and Theory". Funder HMKV: Kulturbetriebe Stadt Dortmund / Dortmunder U - Center for Arts and Creativity.

Opening hours
Tuesday-Wednesday 11am-6pm
Thursday-Friday 11am-8pm
Saturday-Sunday & bank holidays 11am-6pm
Monday closed

Free admission