Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen presents Museum of Display, on view 20 May–3 July 2011. Opening: Thursday 19 May.
With works and interventions by Josef Dabernig, Jill Magid, Isabelle Cornaro, Neïl Beloufa, Metahaven, Nico Dockx, Kris Kimpe and Helmut Draxler.
Josef Dabernig, excursus on fitness, 2010. Film still, courtesy of Galerie Andreas Huber Vienna and Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam.
Museum of Display is the second episode in a series of presentations that look at definitions of ‘art’ and the ‘institution’ within the scenario of a fictional museum, accelerating from rise to self-interrogation, to collapse and possible renewal. These presentations bring together works that make specific claims to how they want to be seen and understood, that project specific notions of the institutional space that would accommodate them.
The first episode, Museum of Speech, engaged—or museified—the model of the art institution as a site of declamation where divergent claims compete for a position of centrality, as a space of polyphonic spontaneity and symbolic deregulation. The epilogue to the series, A Slowdown at the Museum, will pair the model of the institution that sees itself as continuous with—or indistinct from—the ‘real world’ and the hypothesis of a strike, resulting in a delay in art-historical time, a breach in the archive of the present. In between, Museum of Display returns to the long-established critical point that display is never innocent, that it speaks of itself in the third person, in relation to undisclosed criteria and purposes. Rather than confirm an indictment, or propose to de-construct display into an anterior, ‘natural’ state, the presentation engages display as a stage for the performance and regulation of identities. A stage shared by the generic selves that find in the ‘museum’ their allegorical, reversed portraits, and the pliable non-self of the institution, by two forms of organizing the intangible—encoding, decoding and seeking to contain one another.
Read full statement and notes on the works: www.extracity.all2all.org/en/projects/view/66
Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen
Tulpstraat 79
BE-2060 Antwerp
[email protected]
+32(0)3 677 1655
www.extracity.org
