Yvonne Rainer
Space, Body, Language
April 28–July 29, 2012
Museum Ludwig
Heinrich-Böll-Platz
50667 Cologne
www.museum-ludwig.de
Museum Ludwig, Cologne will show the first European retrospective of Yvonne Rainer. It was developed in tandem with the Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Yvonne Rainer already participated in the 1977 Documenta; New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern in London dedicated film retrospectives to her. With Space, Body, Language, the Museum Ludwig and the Kunsthaus Bregenz present for the first time the entire multifaceted oeuvre of Yvonne Rainer.
Yvonne Rainer is a choreographer, dancer, activist, poet, and filmmaker. All her artistic activities are interrelated. As dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, Yvonne Rainer has influenced continously, for over fifty years, art, dance, and film. Her interdisciplinary work is especially highly relevant today.
Today, her comparison of Minimal Art and dance is legendary. In it, she demonstrates how close the advanced practices of visual artists and dance were in the 1960s.
In the 1970s, Yvonne Rainer turned her back on the stage and began to direct movies. In them, she united fiction and reality as well as personal and political views in a highly idiosyncratic approach. Her seven feature films, made between 1972 and 1996, belong to the most extraordinary works of late 20th century film history.
In 2000, Yvonne Rainer began again to work as a choreographer. The pieces she quotes contain elements of popular culture, sports, and the history of dance in general. She also quotes her own works.
For the Cologne venue of the exhibition, the artist Heimo Zobernig (born 1958) has created a special space constellation. In this project, he has juxtaposed his own work, Untitled, to Robert Rauschenberg’s 1968 piece, entitled Soundings. The interaction between exhibits and exhibition architecture reacts to the issue of how dance and film can be jointly shown in an art museum.
Program
The Museum Ludwig has its own theater. The complete film work of Yvonne Rainer will be shown here. Selected films will also be shown in the exhibition.
On April 28, the performance Trio A will be shown at the Museum Ludwig.
Further dates: May 5 & 20, June 2 & 3, as well as July 5, 2012.
On April 29, Yvonne Rainer will perform a lecture-performance. This event is presented in cooperation with ACHT BRÜCKEN | Musik für Köln – John Cage Tage. Place: Museum Ludwig
On May 1, Yvonne Rainer’s Assisted Living: Good Sports 2 and Spiraling Down will be performed in the Tanzhaus NRW, Düsseldorf.
On May 4 & 5, the Museum Ludwig will host a symposium in cooperation with the Zentrum für zeitgenössischen Tanz, HfTM, Köln and the Tanzhaus NRW, Düsseldorf. The theme will be Rainer’s dance and films in the context of contemporary art.
Image above:
Credit: Yvonne Rainer, Trio A, 1973.
The Portland Center for Visual Arts.
© The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2006.M.24).
