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Vienna Art Week Filter (Various Others) Gallery Weekend Warsaw CFA Berlin Vienna Art Week Filter (Various Others) Gallery Weekend Warsaw CFA Berlin
September 2024

Current Issue

Issue No. 135
September 2024
„Country“

The upcoming issue of TEXTE ZUR KUNST is dedicated to the diverse implications and meanings of the countryside for art and contemporary culture. In addition to examining the political appropriation and romanticization of the rural as an idyllic counter-concept to the urban, it focuses on the urban exodus of Berlin’s cultural practitioners to the surrounding countryside, especially to the Uckermark, a rural region in Brandenburg. Conceived under the shadow of upcoming state elections in three German federal states in which the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) is steadily gaining influence, the issue also sheds light on the cultural and political consequences of the current shift to the right.

To the table of contents

13. September 2024

DIE TÜCKEN DER ABSTRAKTEN NEGATION Tobias Ertl über Boris Lurie in der Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista, Venedig

Nachdem wir kürzlich zwei Reviews zur diesjährigen Biennale in Venedig veröffentlichten, bespricht Tobias Ertl hier nun eine Schau, die derzeit parallel in der Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia Werke des 2008 verstorbenen Künstlers Boris Lurie zeigt. Unter dem Titel „Life with the Dead“ versammelt die Ausstellung Arbeiten, in denen Lurie persönliche Erfahrungen des Holocaust und Auseinandersetzungen mit Imperialismus, Neokolonialismus sowie Antikommunismus in Beziehung setzt. Dass er sich dabei der Ästhetik des Obszönen und Vulgären bedient, häufig auch Bildern nackter Frauenkörper, wird in der auf erinnerungspolitische Enthistorisierung anlegten Show ebenso wenig problematisiert, wie das komplexe Verhältnis zwischen Holocaust und Kolonialismus, das mit Blick auf Luries Werk, so Ertl, produktiv hätte thematisiert werden können.

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10. September 2024

GESTALTUNGSKRAFT IM SOMMERLOCH Beate Söntgen über Vanessa Bell in der Courtauld Gallery und „Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors“ im Garden Museum, London

Wie Beate Söntgen in ihrem Beitrag zu unserer aktuellen „Country“-Ausgabe zeigt, prägte das Landleben den literarischen Stil einiger Schriftstellerinnen der Generation Virginia Woolfs, sie selbst eingeschlossen. War der Garten ihres Monk’s House ein Ort des Rückzugs und der Entschleunigung, so fungierte der ihrer Schwester Vanessa Bell im nahe gelegenen Charleston Farmhouse als sozialer Ort gemeinsamen Schaffens, wie Söntgen hier mit Blick auf eine Schau im Garden Museum beleuchtet. Die Praxis des Gärtnerns steht dabei gestalterisch in Wechselwirkung mit Bells Malerei, welche die Courtauld Gallery mit einer weiteren Ausstellung fokussiert. Nachdem ihre Kunst kulturhistorisch oft im Schatten ihrer Schwester und der männlichen Mitglieder der sogenannten Bloomsbury Group – einer Gruppe in unterschiedlich intimen Verbindungen stehender Künstler*innen, Intellektuellen und Wissenschaftler*innen – stand, wirft diese Ausstellung nun ein Schlaglicht auf Bells künstlerisches Oeuvre, und das unter Hervorhebung einer wechselseitigen Durchdringung verschiedener Medien, so die Kunsthistorikerin Söntgen.

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6. September 2024

Seen & Read

BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH AND HAL FOSTER, ONUR ERDUR, INGEBORG BACHMANN

Isabelle Graw’s “Seen and Read” column is back from the summer break, with three publications that bring the season of easy beach reads to a close: A new book features a lengthy conversation between Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster in which they discuss – among other things – the supposedly diminished role of criticism in art. With Schule des Südens (School of the South), Onur Erdur offers a cultural analysis of the “colonial roots of French theory.” And a new collection of notes from Ingeborg Bachmann’s archive tackles predictably existential questions, such as the fundamental role played by writing and travel in the author’s life.

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6. September 2024

GET REAL Dan Hicks on “The Post-Truth Museum” by Nora Al-Badri

Legislators are still scrambling to keep the political influence of deepfakes in check. Artists, meanwhile, have started to use AI to visualize alternative political scenarios. Think of Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s The Finesse (2022, in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann), which explored historically-grounded sci-fi visions of what had been the de facto state of Tamil Eelam, or the Center for Political Beauty’s recent deepfake of German chancellor Olaf Scholz calling for a ban of the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, to name a couple. Nora Al-Badri’s The Post-Truth Museum (2021–23) applies the technology to question what is real and what is fiction in today’s restitution discourse, as Dan Hicks reports, and offers a framework to reimagine the colonial institutional legacy of ethnographic museums.

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Artists' Editions

Adrian Ghenie, "The App 3", 2024

30. August 2024

OUT OF PLACE: FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE Burcu Dogramaci über die 60. Biennale in Venedig

Die 60. Biennale in Venedig geht in ihr letztes Drittel und während der gewohnt beträchtliche, spätsommerliche Schwung an Besucher*innen in die Lagune strömt, begeben wir uns mit zwei Besprechungen zumindest gedanklich dorthin. Während sich eine Rezension speziell mit dem Pavillon der Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate befasst, setzt sich Burcu Dogramaci hier grundsätzlicher mit dem diesjährigen kuratorischen Konzept auseinander. Wenn Adriano Pedrosa unter dem Titel „Foreigners Everywhere“ dazu aufruft, den Begriff des Fremden kritisch zu hinterfragen, öffnet er ihn Dogramaci zufolge zugleich in mannigfaltige Richtungen, wodurch sich bestimmte Partikularitäten in einer Pluralität des Diversen verlieren. Obgleich die kuratorische Rahmung der diesjährigen Biennale Probleme aufweist, gelinge es vor allem spezifischen, in die Ausstellungen aufgenommenen Werken, Themen wie Migration und Fremdsein für Kunstpraxis und -theorie fruchtbar zu machen.

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30. August 2024

WHEN AMNESIA BECOMES FORM Linnéa Bake on Abdullah Al Saadi representing the United Arab Emirates at the 60th Venice Biennale

While one of the two reviews we are publishing today critically engages with the curatorial concept of this year’s Venice Biennial, Linnéa Bake takes a closer look at one specific pavilion: considering Abdullah Al Saadi’s solo exhibition that represents the United Arab Emirates as an exercise in nation-building, Bake refrains from the often-leveled criticism of contemporary culture’s instrumentalization as a resource of “soft power” serving governmental interests. Instead, she shows how Al Saadi’s conceptual art hearkens back to the tradition of classical, pre-Islamic Arab poets and their pilgrimages into the Peninsula’s countryside, thus serving as a way for curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh to consolidate the seven emirates under one national narrative.

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29. August 2024

KASPER KÖNIG (1943–2024) By John Miller

Kasper König will be sorely missed by many. For TEXTE ZUR KUNST, he was an important interlocutor even from the journal’s early days in Cologne. As so much of the art world changed and accelerated in recent decades, König remained a reliable presence for his numerous friends, colleagues, and closer acquaintances, who famously got regular updates from him via snail mail, especially in the form of postcards, which he personalized with love and wit. John Miller highlights a few examples in this obituary – the first of a series we will publish in memory of Kasper König.

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28. August 2024

WAITING, SITTING, LYING, LAYING Caroline Lillian Schopp on the Sculptural Vocabulary of Lydia Nobles

As many contributions to our current issue on “Sculpture” illuminate, the human body has, throughout art history, constituted the reference point for the medium and its theorization – whether as its counterpart in space or its spatial representation. Regarding Lydia Nobles’ ongoing series “As I Sit Waiting,” in which the artist reflects on individual abortion stories, Caroline Lillian Schopp explicates how each of Nobles’ sculptures proposes a posture of human inclination and provokes an empathetic response from its beholder while reorienting the medium in an unmonumental and anti-patriarchal direction. The latter feels especially timely at a moment when the roadmap of a possible second Trump presidency, Project 2025, puts reproductive health care and bodily self-determination – amongst other fundamental human rights – at great risk.

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TEXTE ZUR KUNST stands for controversial discussions and contributions by internationally leading writers on contemporary art and culture. Alongside ground-breaking essays, the quarterly magazine – which was founded in Cologne in 1990 by Stefan Germer (†) and Isabelle Graw and has been published, since 2000, in Berlin – offers interviews, roundtable discussions, and comprehensive reviews on art, film, music, the market, fashion, art history, theory, and cultural politics. Since 2006, the journal's entire main section has been published in both German and English. Additionally, each issue features exclusive editions by internationally renowned artists, who generously support the magazine by producing a unique series.