11 September 2010 - 16 January 2011

Real Presences

Marcel Broodthaers today

This joint exhibition by Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen presents selected works by international artists that make explicit reference to Marcel Broodthaers or that examine and further develop motifs from his oeuvre. During his lifetime, Broodthaers was one of the most influential artists of his generation. Today, over 30 years after his death, his work is as relevant as ever. References to the visual theories and themes of his oeuvre - such as questioning the museum as an institution, examining imagination and outer appearance as a deconstruction of the cinematic image, and the relationship between language, writing and images - can be found in the work of numerous contemporary artists. Ideas that were treated much later under the heading of institutional criticism also turn up in Broodthaers' work, whose radical, pioneering qualities survive to this day.

Cerith Wyn Evans' installation Has the film already started? projects a film onto a white helium balloon. However, the film it shows - the avant-garde classic L'Anticoncept - is not identifiable, since Wyn Evans recorded it as a simple, bright beam of light from the movie projector. What emerges is the impression of an abstract figuration reminiscent of a solar eclipse. Wyn Evans replaces the soundtrack with a composition of his own, which is a combination of birdsong and an interview with Broodthaers. The palm trees surrounding the balloon are the same ones that Broodthaers used in many of his installations.

Other artists like Olivier Foulon are less interested in producing object-centred works and focus on accentuating and re-negotiating existing visual productions, and on displaying images from books and catalogues in formats such as slide shows. This approach gives Foulon an opportunity to examine themes such as the difference between showing a work of art in an atelier and showing it in an institutional framework. The parallels with Broodthaers' critical attitude towards the institutionalised treatment of art are striking.

Henrik Olesen takes this critical approach a step further. His collages, installations and architectural interventions are ongoing examinations of sexual constructs and identity constructs as perpetuated by institutions inside and outside the art world. His works expose social conventions as the consequence of politically motivated categorisations and exclusionary mechanisms. Using conceptual strategies, he reveals the construction of reality in general and historiography in particular.

Kirsten Pieroth is interested in the possibilities of presenting everyday objects, situations and icons of cultural production in ways that diverge from the expectations we have formed through our experiences and habits. By appropriating, re-interpreting and de-contextualising what we already know, her work visualises multiple ways of reading things that we would not normally scrutinise. With biting humour and simple means, Pieroth points to the constructed nature of things and, like Broodthaers, creates new organisational systems that question the meaning of the old. The way in which she plays with the symbolic nature of language and with the meanings assigned to things in conceptual systems represents another link between her art and that of the Belgian artist.

In keeping with the Quadriennale theme "Kunstgegenwärtig" (art in the present), this exhibition presents the contemporary as a genealogy of the present and expresses it in works whose references acknowledge their historical source of inspiration, thereby reviving and updating Broodthaers' work, even in his absence.

Featuring Tacita Dean, Olivier Foulon, Andreas Hofer, Henrik Olesen, Kirsten Pieroth, Stephen Prina, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Susanne M. Winterling, Cerith Wyn Evans