On the Move

On the Move. European Kunsthalle at the KUB Arena
Kunsthaus Bregenz
27|04—30|06|2013
Project-based, performative, on the move—is a possible description of the European Kunsthalle’s program. Founded in Cologne in 2005 as a discursive platform without fixed premises, it has developed its own forms of institutional action. As a contemporary art institution that combines a wide range of artistic procedures and interventions in current art and cultural debates, it exists wherever its projects take place. The European Kunsthalle itself has the attributes of an event, appearing only to disappear and then reappear somewhere else. The stress laid on openness and processes turns the idea of an institution set in a narrowly defined geographical framework into a fluid concept that focuses more on artistic processes.
The KUB Arena presentation places the idea of performativity —the appearance and disappearance of temporary artistic spaces— in the foreground. Drawing on certain aspects of past European Kunsthalle activities, it simultaneously presents artistic projects that combine »eventfulness« and an engagement with questions of cultural, social, and institutional spaces.
In this spirit, the artist Dorit Margreiter together with Lina Streeruwitz and Luciano Parodi has conceived an extensive exhibition architecture building on an earlier European Kunsthalle design in Cologne. The Austrian artist created a temporary modular spatial structure in Cologne, whose final—initially unrealized—element is now being brought to fruition in a modified form in Bregenz. Stephen Willats, whose multimedia work In And Out the Underworld for the Ebertplatz square in Cologne brilliantly captured the social aspect of this specific site in 2009, will be presenting this work in a version especially modified for Bregenz. The Macedonian artist Yane Calovski, whose work revolves around structures of institutional and personal narratives, will be presenting a new work suggesting a subjective reading of the European Kunsthalle’s history, while David Maljkovic in his Display for Lost Pavilion at Metro Pictures, New York and Temporary Projection continues his engagement with presentational forms and their reduction to their objects, developing a film projector without film and a sound system without sound.
Johannes Wohnseifer, in contrast, presents a different and unusual use of museum space in a series of photographs— in 1998 he invited skateboarder Mark Gonzales to use specially created sculptures as performance ramps in the rooms of the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach.
Additionally both Nick Mauss and Charlotte Moth will be developing new works for the Bregenz exhibition.
Following the cooperation with the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 2011, the KUB Arena’s present invitation is the second to an institution whose modes of work and program display many parallels with those of the KUB Arena
itself. An integral part of the presentation of the European Kunsthalle will be a weekend of events on June 8 and 9, 2013, comprising a program packed with films, lectures, and talks.