documenta Institute Discourse #11

Monday, October 21, 2019, 07.00 pm

Venue: Auditorium of the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Menzelstraße 13-15

Admission free

Address of Welcome: Prof. Dr. Nora Sternfeld, documenta professor

A collaboration with the documenta professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.

The lecture presents the creation, implementation and documentation of the exhibition "Macho Man: Tell It to My Heart", poses questions about the identity of collections and analyzes their curatorial and institutional conditions using concrete examples.

"Macho Man: Tell It to My Heart" was presented in 2013 at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel and subsequently at Culturgest in Lisbon and Artists Space in New York. The exhibition brought together over 200 works of art from the collection of the artist Julie Ault. Most of these works are gifts from artists or friends and many have an ephemeral character. The works are spread over several places where Ault regularly spends time, some visible, some packed in boxes, under the couch or behind the desk. Ault never saw herself as a collector, which is why no specific theme in the conventional sense can be identified in the collection. What ties the collection together is the idea of dialogue, friendship and exchange about ideas, what art and collecting can be, and the things that frame the spaces of everyday life.

The exhibition is the result of a collaborative process between several artists and curators (Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Nikola Dietrich, Heinz Peter Knes, Jason Simon, Scott Cameron Weaver and Danh Vo) and reflects a dialogue that constantly accompanies and challenges artistic and curatorial action.

The event is a cooperation between the Department of Architecture, Urban and Landscape Planning at the University of Kassel, the Kunsthochschule Kassel and the documenta archiv.

Martin Beck is an artist living in New York and Vienna. His works deal with questions of historicity and authorship and are often based on discourses from architecture, design and popular culture. A leitmotif of his practice is the theme of the display: his works often address themes of exhibition, presentation and questions of communication formats. In 2018 Beck's works were shown in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bergen, Norway, Frac Lorraine, Metz, and 47 Canal, New York. Further exhibitions include "rumors and murmurs" at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Last Night at the Kitchen in New York; "...what follows may have produced what went before" at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (all 2017); Program at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge (2014-16), "The thirty-six sets do not constitute a sequence." at 47 Canal, New York (2015); contributions to the 10th Shanghai Biennial (2014-15) and the 29th São Paulo Biennial (with Julie Ault) (2010). Beck's publications include "About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe" (2007), The Aspen Complex (2012), "Last Night" (2013), "An Organized Systems of Instructions", and "rumors and murmurs" (both 2017).