Press release:

Continually in motion
The artist Tino Sehgal rearranges the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition

Where red bead curtains “Untitled” (Blood) previously marked the passageways of a room, Italian chocolates now lie neatly arranged along the skirting board, and where the candy installation “Untitled” (USA Today) initially formed a geometric carpet, now the candies wrapped in silver paper – “Untitled” (Placebo) – have been pushed together in an amorphous shape. Part two of the retrospective “Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form” at the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst began on 18 March.  

In the first version of the retrospective, curated by Elena Filipovic (29 Jan to 17 Mar 2011), approximately fifty sculptures, photographs, paintings and works in the public realm – some rare, some quite well known – were on view. That particular selection and arrangement of artworks provided only once glimpse onto how we might come to know the varied and complex oeuvre of the Cuban born, American artist Gonzalez-Torres, who died in 1996 at age thirty-eight. It was only part of the story. The idea of having the exhibition newly curated by an artist half way through its duration is inspired by Gonzalez-Torres’s view that artworks need not be static objects, but are instead dependent on the viewer’s subjectivity and are accordingly in a state of constant change – even to the point of potentially disappearing altogether.

As the culmination of this touring retrospective, internationally renowned artist Tino Sehgal was chosen to curate the show’s second half. Sehgal’s own artistic approach bears resemblance to that of Gonzalez-Torres, each artist’s work questioning the very idea of an artwork and its circulation and distribution in radical ways. In the case of Sehgal, the artist makes what he calls “constructed situations”:  immaterial artworks that involve participants who create social interaction with the audience, thus comprising an artwork that undergoes constant change and vanishes upon execution. For the second part of the exhibition ending on 25 April, Sehgal not only made an entirely new selection of works from Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre but also developed a choreography according to which many objects in the exhibition change form and location every hour until, by the end of each day, roughly six very different constellations of objects will have been visible. The result is Sehgal’s radical curatorial proposition: a continuously changing Gonzales-Torres exhibition, or even several exhibitions in one, in which the process of transformation is not hidden from view, but visible, and shared with the audience. It insists that new things can be understood about an oeuvre depending on the juxtapositions and conditions it is seen under. Depending on the length of his or her visit, the visitor can witness the various stages of these changes. Sehgal’s interventions take the exhibition title “Specific Objects without Specific Form” very literally into account.

 Photos can be downloaded on our website www.mmk-frankfurt.de
 
Press contact:
Christina Henneke
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