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Kunsthaus Bregenz Announces Yvonne Rainer. Space, Body, Language

The Kunsthaus Bregenz presents Yvonne Rainer in Bregenz. Space, Body, Language on 4 Feb – 9 Apr 2012.


Yvonne Rainer, “Assisted Living: Good Sports 2,” 2011, Yvonne Rainer, Sally Silvers, Emmanuèlle Phuon, Joel Reynolds, Pat Catterson, Keith Sabado, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC, Color photograph.

With Yvonne Rainer, who was born in San Francisco in 1934, the Kunsthaus Bregenz is presenting in collaboration with the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, an internationally leading choreographer, dancer, and film-maker. Already at the beginning of the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer surprised the New York art and dance scene with choreographies in which she succeeded impressively in developing a completely new fascinating language characterized not least of all by the introduction of everyday gestures and actions into modern dance.

Ten years later, Yvonne Rainer took leave of the stage to make feature films that united fiction and reality as well as the personal and the private with a way of directing specific to her. Apart from their character as documents of the times, political topics such as racism, autobiographical aspects, and feminist questions render her seven films made between 1972 and 1996 as outstanding exemplars of 20th century film history.

Already at the beginning of her career, she was, both personally and professionally, constantly in close contact with artists of whom some, such as Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Robert Rauschenberg, became involved as actors or in some other way in her dance pieces.

Since 2000, Yvonne Rainer has been choreographing again, drawing on elements of pop culture, sport, general dance history, and her own works.

Even though Yvonne Rainer has had film retrospectives in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the London Tate Modern, and her influence on the visual arts, especially among the younger generation, cannot be overestimated, up until now there has been no large comprehensive exhibition in Europe that has undertaken to ascribe to this complex oeuvre its significance for art history and to come to terms with its current relevance. The exhibition curated by Yilmaz Dziewior and Barbara Engelbach in Bregenz and Cologne (April 28 to July 29, 2012) will change this.

KUB Arena
Enduring Value?
Cooperation >springerin< 4 Feb – 9 Apr 2012 With Yto Barrada, Alice Creischer, Josef Dabernig, Katrina Daschner, Andreas Fogarasi, Claire Fontaine, Sanja Ivekovic, Julius Koller, Jiri Kovanda, Dorit Margreiter, Ulrike Müller, Andreas Pawlik, Mathias Poledna, Florian Pumhösl, Walid Raad, Jochen Schmith, Andreas Siekmann, Mladen Stilinovic, Kamen Stoyanov, Milica Tomic, and an exhibtion architecture by Johannes Porsch Concepts such as “changing values” or “the decline in values,” normally in relation to the corruption or erosion of traditional values, are much talked about nowadays. At the same time, material goods and increasingly all-embracing individualistic values seem to be becoming more important than ever. How is this development reflected in the sphere of art? What new positions, erosions, and breaks with the past have come about in the past ten to fifteen years? What visible factors pertaining to value and validity have established themselves in conjunction with what more or less valid articulable factors? What ideas of value, transient or enduring, are inscribed in such different art-related formats as exhibitions, works, discourse, or media such as journals and magazines? In the framework of a collaboration between springerin and the KUB Arena concurrent with the production of the journal’s spring 2012 number, a project-oriented presentation will be developed on the ground floor of the Kunsthaus Bregenz. Central issues here are questions about the durability and “shelf-life” of art and cultural appreciation and the different productive and distributive modes of exhibitions and magazines. A complete overview of springerin publications to be presented in the KUB Arena and a jointly conceived program of events are further core areas of the project “Enduring Value?”. Curators: Christa Benzer, Eva Birkenstock, Yilmaz Dziewior, Christian Höller, Hedwig Saxenhuber, Georg Schöllhammer Kunsthaus Bregenz Karl-Tizian-Platz 6900 Bregenz Austria www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at

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