Salon der Angst
6 September 2013–12 January 2014
Opening: Thursday, September 5, 7pm
Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Wien, Austria
Hours: Daily 10am–7pm, Thursday 10am–9pm
Angst is a specifically German term for which there is no direct equivalent in other languages able to express the diverse meanings that come together in this word. Together with fear, anxiety and disquiet, it is an existential and thoroughly human feeling. Everyone knows what it is but finds it difficult to put into words. The exhibition Salon der Angst engages with those diffuse feelings of insecurity and threat, but also shows that the individual and collective angst-inducing experiences and events are culturally determined. The particular and central focus lies on forms of angst that are heightened by mass media or are intended to recalibrate its normal limits. Salon der Angst takes the perspective of contemporary art and links it with selected historical positions, thus examining the angst of our times and opening up the emotional and socio-political spectra involved.
The exhibition Salon der Angst at Kunsthalle Wien moves between two poles of collective, politically instrumentalised angst and its individual, aesthetically transformed counterpart. As an omnipresent narrative that is used as a defence against putative threats, anxiety and fear have an important function in today’s social and political processes. Of these many forms of angst, here those conveyed and promoted by events such as 9/11, the financial crisis and the social and political shifts resulting from globalization are at the core of Salon der Angst.
Angst, here as the calculated effect of aesthetic production, stands alongside the more subtle mechanisms of contemporary angst-making; the political rhetoric of angst alongside individual experiences of it. Salon der Angst is thus concerned with a multi-layered and existential condition from the perspective of the contemporary, but will also bring a historical context to the subject by presenting selected works by James Ensor, Alfred Kubin, Ferdinand van Kessel and Francis Picabia.
New works, specially made for Salon der Angst, by Kader Attia, Marina Faust, Rainer Ganahl and Marco Lulić will encounter loaned works by Jeff Wall, Willem de Rooij, Thomas Hirschhorn, Peter Fischli / David Weiss and many others.
Artists: Nel Aerts, Özlem Altin, Kader Attia, Gerard Byrne, Los Carpinteros, James Ensor, Ieva Epnere, Harun Farocki, Marina Faust, Didier Faustino, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Rainer Ganahl, Agnès Geoffray, Thomas Hirschhorn, Iraqi Children’s Art Exchange, Cameron Jamie, Jesse Jones, Dorota Jurczak, Ferdinand van Kessel, Bouchra Khalili, Eva Kotátková, Nicolas Kozakis / Raoul Vaneigem, Alfred Kubin, Erik van Lieshout, Jen Liu, Marko Lulić, Fabian Marti, Florin Mitroi, Marcel Odenbach, Jane Ostermann-Petersen, Francis Picabia, Willem de Rooij, Allan Sekula, Zin Taylor, Noam Toran, Kerry Tribe, Peter Wächtler, Jeff Wall, Mark Wallinger, Gillian Wearing, Tobias Zielony
Curators: Nicolaus Schafhausen, Cathérine Hug
For further information, please visit www.kunsthallewien.at
#Angst / #KunsthalleWien / #WienKultur
Press contact: Katharina Murschetz, +43 1 52189 1221, presse [at] kunsthallewien.at
