Atelier Van Lieshout.
Slave City
25 April – 6 July 2008
Kahrstrasse 16,
45128 Essen
Germany
With a wide-ranging presentation of plans, drawings, sculptures, models and installations from the years 2005-2008, the Museum Folkwang is opening for debate the latest project of the Dutch artists’ collective Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL). “Slave City” is a utopia; an urban project by AVL designed to maximize rationality, efficiency and profit. As a starting point for the project begun in 2005, Joep van Lieshout – the head of the atelier – worked with contemporary ethical and aesthetic values, ideas on nutrition, environmental protection, organization, management and markets, in order to re-combine and reinterpret them. Slave City aims at complete autonomy, presented as a perversion of a highly modern achievement-oriented society.
The Slave City models (from mini to life-size) present a perfectly conceived and creative city, with comprehensive infrastructure, service buildings, universities, health and shopping centers, villages, brothels and museums. With expected annual profits of 7.8 billion Euro, 78 million Euro is budgeted for the arts.
Joep van Lieshout (1963) founded the artists’ collective in 1995. In 2001 he realized AVL-Ville, an independent city-state in Rotterdam harbor. Atelier van Lieshout became internationally well-known in the 1990’s with the production of mobile houses and “covers”, the conception of which was based on the freedom of movement, flexibility of design and the subversion of government planning approval. Moreover, AVL developed ready to use furniture, functional toilette systems, bunks, living capsules and office units. His Rectum-Bar, in the form of a large digestive tract, will be in operation in front of the Museum Folkwang for the course of the exhibition.
With the exhibition there will be an extensive complementary program and a symposium entitled “The Bondage of the Future” in cooperation with the NRW Cultural Studies Institute. For the exhibition, an extensive reader is being prepared.
The exhibition is a continuation of the cooperation between the Museum Folkwang and RWE AG in the area of contemporary art.
Curator: Sabine Maria Schmidt
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The museum is closed: Whitsun Monday