BÖHLER & ORENDT'S MEMORY MOVERS: An exhibition at the Neues Museum Nürnberg in cooperation with the Institut for Modern Art Nuremberg

Opening: April 25, 2024, 7 p.m.
Exhibition duration: April 26 - October 6, 2024

Why do we collect all the images and objects, documents, stories and poems stored in archives? And what do they mean to us, at a time when wars and totalitarian tendencies are unbalancing social structures in many parts of the world and ecological crises are on the rise?

In Memory Movers at the Neues Museum Nuremberg, Berlin-based artist duo Böhler & Orendt are showing an expansive installation with over a hundred items from more than fifty archives. Using various technical means and aesthetic references to video games, Hollywood blockbusters and Greek mythology, they have developed an interactive spatial narrative. In front of three dark tunnel entrances, a traffic jam of new and historic cars, bicycles, trolleys, mopeds, ice-cream vans and other vehicles twists its way across the exhibition hall. They are heavily laden with boxes containing objects selected by the artists from a wide variety of periods and contexts. Photographs documenting protests against the nuclear waste storage site in Gorleben can be found alongside well-known works by Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp, next to a Circus Roncalli Playmobil set.

The documenta archiv is contributing loan items relating to the project "Disappearing Element / Disappeared Element (Imminent Past)" by the Brazilian artist Cildo Mereiles: for documenta 11 (2002), he had water ice on a stick sold in Kassel for just one euro. With his "industrial poem in public space", Mereiles addressed the increasing scarcity of the resource "drinking water". The consumption and rapid melting of the ice made of pure water made the volatilization of the element perceptible to the senses: an impulse to reflect on global inequalities and the value of water as a vital resource and as a commodity.

Press Release