Kontakt. Art Collection at VIENNAFAIR
September 20–23, 2012
Viennafair
Messe Wien, Hall A, Entrance A
Messeplatz 1
A-1020 Vienna/Austria
Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation will be presented at this year’s Viennafair from September 20 to 23, 2012. The exhibition Under the Surface – A Constant Attempt to Relate gathers works pertaining to art actions and/or performances from the 1970s, during which the relationships between art and life became interwoven on the level of perception. The transformations and qualitative changes of a developmental relationship are shown via the incorporation of temporality. The network of individual moments thus composed forms the relationships and defines the recollective realm. By way of contrast, the photographs showing actions document how artists experiment with their own bodies; this experimentation, manifested in occurrences of a theatrical nature, is intended to generate various types of emotional tension. The artists’ experimentation with their own bodily limitations is much like experimentation with the limitations of societal consciousness and the taboos associated therewith. These performances were for the most part staged in private or semipublic venues. The works presented in this exhibition, showing artistic stances from the 1970s as well as more recent output, must be viewed as more than just criticism of a societal situation. All of these are not correctives for societal processes in and of themselves, but much rather aesthetic statements and/or commentaries.
Artists represented at Viennafair
Pavel Braila, Geta Brătescu, Miklós Erdély, Maria Hahnenkamp , Dóra Maurer, Karel Miler, Jan Mlčoch, Petr Štembera, Sven Stilinović, Goran Trbuljak, Manfred Willmann
In the framework of Viennafair, Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation will relaunch its website with all the artists represented in the collection, images and data on the works as well as descriptive texts by renowned authors. For further information see www.kontakt-collection.net.
Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation focuses on art production in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, which has accompanied the social and political developments over the past decades and contributed significant artworks to European art history since the late 1950s.
Since 2004, a newly elaborated concept has served to reestablish Erste Group’s collecting activities in terms of both content and method. Kontakt collects works which play an integral part within European art history but which claim a status of exceptionality within a politically heterogeneous terrain. The work of the collection is embedded in a program of related activities including exhibitions, loans, research, documentation and the exploration of the social and political framework in which the artworks were produced.
The collection bears the name “Kontakt” in tribute to the work of Slovak artist Július Koller (1939–2007). The term’s existence in German, Czech and Slovak was taken as an impetus to use it as a name for the collection in order to overcome the former East-West boundaries, as well as to assemble a body of works which has meanwhile made its way into a pan-European canon of art history.
