Calendar

Participating artists:
Viltė Bražiūnaitė / Tomas Sinkevičius, Burak Delier, Buck Ellison, Isabella Fürnkäs, Eva Giolo, Thibaut Henz, Jan Hoeft, Hanne Lippard, Joanna Piotrowska, Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij, Jana Schulz, Andrzej Steinbach, Ingel Vaikla, Peter Wächtler, Ian Wallace, Tobias Zielony

Venue:
Kunsthalle Wien
Museumsquartier
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Wien


Group exhibition in the Kunsthalle Wien curated by Vanessa Joan Müller and Nicolaus Schafhausen

In a sketch for a film, Michelangelo Antonioni noted: "The Antarctic glaciers are approaching three millimeters each year. Calculate when they arrive. Foresee in a movie what will happen then. "

The metaphor of the cold stands for a deeply felt alienation. Alienation was already a dominant theme for sociologists around 1900: the alienation of man from social ties through individualization, the alienation from nature through urbanization, the alienation from work through mechanization. For philosophers like Theodor W. Adorno, alienation becomes a key concept in terms of the role of art in and for society: without alienation, there is no art, and ultimately only art prevents total alienation.

In the 1960s, of all things, it is the Cultural Revolutionary protest against the "social coldness" and "hardening" of bourgeois society, which anticipates the ideologies of flexibilized capitalism 2.0. In this way, a new kind of alienation is being prepared for the ground, which now opens up to a reverse metaphor: coldness and rigidity are followed by liquefaction, departure and dynamism - alienation, however, remains in the now self-optimizing society.

Antarctica looks at the alienation of basic patterns of a "relationship of unrelatedness" and traces the term in its timeliness and the associated sociological findings in numerous contemporary works. This also raises the question of which other forms of world and self-reference it needs to create anything like space for self-determination and self-realization.

The exhibition is preceded by a symposium on the subject.