September 27, 2023–June 9, 2024
Kunsthaus Graz celebrates 20 years with a festive program and the two interrelated exhibitions Re-Imagine the Future: The Other and Sol LeWitt’s Wall. Performed.
Opening weekend: September 27–30, 2023
With talks and performances by: Franz Jochum and choir, Jasmina Cibic, Colin Fournier, Winfried Ritsch, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, and more.
Weaving a multitude of possible strands from history into the present and the future becomes the guiding principle for a polyphonic speculation entitled Re-Imagine the Future. On show is Sol LeWitt’s Wall. Performed in Space01, as well as the group exhibition The Other in Space02.
Kunsthaus Graz marks its 20th anniversary thereby with a differentiated re-activation of history, focusing on the unexposed and less visible aspects of past projects, specific new artistic productions, and performative interventions. The call put out by the Kunsthaus architects Colin Fournier and Peter Cook, “Up into the Unknown,” was and is an adventurous invitation to probe the boundaries of one’s imagination and to respond to the demand for alternative ideas and utopias.
After almost 20 years, the monumental and site-specific work Wall by seminal American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt is reactivated and recontextualised. The work acts as the basis for a rethinking of the past in the present and a projection of the future in the process of examination.
Drawing on LeWitt’s Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, the show consequently starts from the idea and immateriality. Subsequently it works through aspects of physicality, co-creation and questions of modularity. The reconstruction of the monumental physical drawing evolves as a collaborative action and a confrontational work that is challenged from different angles by artists such as Jasmina Cibic, Franz Vana, Renate Krammer, and Superflex. The exhibition will thereby give scope for an investigation of both its conceptual and its aesthetic form. Sol LeWitt’s Wall becomes a platform, a podium, and a stage that tells of the crossing, permeability, and performativity of history, its form, and ultimately also about political demarcations.
Furthermore, Sol LeWitt’s Wall enters a dialogue with the group exhibition The Other, which addresses themes such as identity, history, belonging, and exclusion.
In general understanding, the notion of the “Other” is almost always linked to demarcation, a separation, a difference or distinctness from something or someone. The Other is the one that does not belong, western perspective defines the Other as East, Orient, or exotic South. In the present there has been a shift in the perception of the Other, according to Arjun Appadurai, the difference to someone is transformed into a differentiation that has no trajectory; even further, it becomes fluid and dispersed. Along with this change, we can observe that the more this difference becomes omnipresent the stronger the need to eliminate it seems to be. This is visible through the process of global unification that is perpetuated by capital, or past and present tendencies to erase social groups and individuals that we define as other in the most horrific acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The exhibition invites us to take the concept of the Other as a potentiality that ventures into an exploration of the relations of asymmetry that on the one hand perpetuate the exploitative relation, or on the other hand turn to historical and present alternatives that side with and rely on solidarity and comradeship.
The Other dwells on the paradoxical position of the Other as a constituent element, but also as a disruption. Just like in the image of Sol LeWitt’s Wall disruption is not only serving to differentiate but it is an impulse to think this difference as an opening for possible future scenarios and confrontations.
With works and interventions by: Nika Autor, Kader Attia, Rossella Biscotti, Black Quantum Futurism (BQF), Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Jasmina Cibic, Lana Čmajčanin, Olafur Eliasson, IRWIN, Bouchra Khalili, Kapwani Kiwanga, Renate Krammer, Marina Naprushkina, Driton Selmani, Société Réaliste, Jonas Staal, Superflex, Helene Thümmel, Franz Vana, Hannes Zebedin et al.
