AKADEMIE [Arbeitstitel]
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
Opening reception: October 20th 2017
Duration of the exhibition: Oct 21st 2017 - Feb 7th 2018
In the winter of 2017/2018 the Kunsthalle together with KIT will respectively address the theme “Academy” from different angles. In the third show of the anniversary year, the present comes to the fore, but without having lost a view of history and the Kunsthalle’s archive. Inspired by the legendary exhibition series “between” (1969-1973), which emerged from student unrest and protests against the institution —particularly among students of the Kunstakademie— the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf invites professors and students of the Düsseldorf and Münster Kunstakademies as well as the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (KHM) to Academy [Working Title] to confront from a critical, contemporary perspective a range of topics that attend the archive and to negotiate the significance of an historical legacy as well as the proximity of institutions and academies in the Rheinland to the production of art.
Alongside an immediate engagement with the Kunsthalle’s archive materials, more extensive and abstract engagement with the idea of the archive may ensue from consideration of the archive as a site of memory at the cross-section of heritage, historical burden, think tank, memory-architecture and much more. The category “archive” and the categories in which the archive is invested and so by which it is brought about such as art history, cultural identities and individual mythologies should be critically questioned. What role does the archive play for the individual artistic creation and the perception of an institution? How does the now-time [Jetzt-Zeit] deal with and evaluate the past? To what extent do not only collective, but also private archives themselves represent forms of artistic practice?
In collaboration with the curatorial team of the Kunsthalle, various medial formats can be worked through based on the different emphases and approaches of the professors and classes. As the notion “Working Title” in the exhibition title indicates, the exhibition has an open-ended, experimental format. Permanent access not only to the perpetually renewed implementations of the exhibition but also to the discursive exchange, work processes and structures will be open to the visitors. It is left up to each individual the extent to which they take part in the exchange, simply observe or deliberately interfere and in so doing enter into the artistic works and “final result” of the exhibition and, by extension, into the history of the institution.
Further items on the program agenda between theater, performance, concerts, workshops and presentations from invited speakers will be held under the label “Performing Archive,” in search of ever new accents of the archive. Information regarding the participants, the program and the shifting uses of the spaces will be made available shortly before the opening of the exhibition.
Group project - class of Katharina Grosse
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf | Grabbelplatz 4 | 40213 Düsseldorf
