Barbara Kruger Believe + Doubt 19|10|2013- 12|01|2014

KUB 2013.04 | Press release Barbara Kruger Believe + Doubt 19|10|2013- 12|01|2014

Curators of the exhibition Yilmaz Dziewior and Rudolf Sagmeister

Press Conference Thursday, October 17, 2013, 12 noon

The exhibition is opened for the press at 11 a.m.

Opening Friday, October 18, 2013, 7 p.m.

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Few artists have succeeded in treating the ambivalent ef- fects of the mass media and their powers of persuasion in impressive works of art so cogently and variously as Bar- bara Kruger has done for more than four decades now. So it is no surprise that she is represented in major museum collections worldwide and enjoys broad public attention through exhibitions at renowned institutions. She has had large-scale solo exhibitions, for example, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In addition, she participated in documenta 7 (1982) and documenta 8 (1987) in Kassel, and she received the »Golden Lion« at the 51 st Venice Biennale 2005 for her life’s work. It is all the more surpris- ing then that the exhibition covering three floors of the Kunsthaus Bregenz is her first major institutional solo show in Austria.

Not that Barbara Kruger is a newcomer to Bregenz. In summer 2011 she participated in the Kunsthaus Bregenz solidarity action for Ai Weiwei by designing a poster con- sisting of white lettering on a red ground asking »Why Weiwei«—and adding, in smaller lettering below, her familiar formula: »Belief + Doubt = Sanity.« Before this, in the same year, for the KUB group exhibition That’s the way we do it , she produced an almost 20 meter long by 4 meter high digital print that addressed the issues around so called »intellectual property« and the distributional powers of the internet.

The new solo exhibition especially designed by the artist for the Kunsthaus gives visitors a chance to explore the wide range of her artistic practice in different media. Alongside a host of her celebrated photocollages from the 1980s and a four-channel video work of 2004, she is for the most part presenting new installations in Bregenz that have been especially conceived for the unique Kunsthaus architecture. Through emphasizing different architectural elements in turn (façade, wall, floor, ceiling) and deliberate changes of media, she creates a varied trajectory that sensitizes the viewer to the specific details of Peter Zumthor’s building no less than to the fundamental im- portance that Barbara Kruger attaches to art’s presentational context. What makes her videos, installations, col- lages, posters, and photographs compelling, among other things, is how she consciously reflects the art system—its hierarchies and strategies as well as its presentational and distributional relations. Again and again, Barbara Kruger breaks out of this system’s closed circuit by conceiving projects for magazines, poster walls, or other media and sites in public space.

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These include permanent and temporary projects that refer specifically to particular buildings, or which emerge at sites in urban space in the form of designs for buses and posters.

It is worth noting here that Barbara Kruger was already using illustrations she found in mass media geared to a wide audience for her b&w photocollage works at the start of her career in the 1970s. Her first intensive involvement with print media occurred shortly after she had finished studying art and design, when she was employed as a graphic artist and picture editor by Condé Nast Publica- tions in New York. Among the magazines she worked on were Mademoiselle and House and Garden . Her insights there into the power of images, both to deter and to se- duce, were an early influence on the artist’s work.

Throughout her career, Barbara Kruger has reflected on or augmented the formal, thematic, and visual messages of these specific communication strategies, often unmasking their problematic ambiguity in the process. Just as the distribution and presentation sites she has used (e.g. magazines, posters) are characterized by a certain transience and intensified circulation, so too Kruger often insists on the ephemeral physical status of her works, since her wall and large-scale spatial installations are usually destroyed at the end of an exhibition. That they can be installed again in the same or in a different form on another occasion is just one of the ways in which the artist comments, with relish and wit, on the complex commodity character of art. Ultimately Barbara Kruger’s works are characterized by a high level of social commitment, advocating women’s rights, freedom of opinion, a critical awareness of the se- ductions of consumer culture, and of how power, or the lack of it, determines the feel of our days and nights. These—in the best sense of the word—striking works are captivating for their immediacy, their directness of address involving the viewer by means of questions or clear-cut statements. Depending on their message, her text-image designs provoke the viewer to contradict, endorse, laugh, or ponder. No one is left cold.

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Messages that Barbara Kruger has used in various contexts are already legendary, for instance: »I shop, therefore I am,« »Your body is a battleground,« or »We don’t need another hero.« The images she combines with these and other sentences have been fished out of the pool of visual social memory, and for her words and statements she also normally draws on what is already there. In both cases, she deliberately shuns any hierarchy of high and low to create the works that are to an equal extent political, iconic, and poetic, for which she is widely known.

Text: Yilmaz Dziewior

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KUB Billboards Barbara Kruger 07 | 10 | 2013 – 12 | 01 | 2014 Seestraße Bregenz

Barbara Kruger has selected text works for the six KUB Billboards along Seestraße between the train station and Kunsthaus Bregenz. Her iconic text-images directly address passersby with short poetic-philosophical statements and inquiries, occasionally also utilizing the German language, so as to more closely engage the local public.

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The Seismographs of Architecture From Model to Reality November 8 to November 11, 2013

Kunsthaus Bregenz in cooperation with Peter Ebner—3M futureLAB at UCLA + futureLAB at HUD The symposium The Seismographs of Architecture is being orginised as a platform for a dialogue at the interface between art, architecture, and society. The principle of per- meating boundaries will itself become a subject of the symposium. Internationally renowned experts are being invited from a wide range of fields, including architects, construction engineers, urban planners, designers, and artists, who all share a desire to experiment as well as an interest in current and new developments.

Friday, November 8

3.45 pm Welcome Yilmaz Dziewior Director Kunsthaus Bregenz 3.55 pm Welcome Peter Ebner | 3M futureLAB at UCLA + futureLAB at HUD 4 pm Heatherwick Studio —Ole Smith | Architect, Designer, Great Britain 5 pm CAt —Kazuhiro Kojima & Kazuko Akamatsu | Architects, Japan 7 pm Urban-Think Tank —Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner | Architects, Urban Planners, Venezuela|Switherland 8 pm Preston Scott Cohen | Architect, USA

Saturday, November 9

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Architectural Tour—Vorarlberg’s Art of Construction Saturday, November 9 – 9 am to 2 pm This half-day architectural tour, accompanied by an expert guide, will be visiting some recent examples of contemporary architecture in Vorarlberg, such as the Altach Islamic Cemetery (Bernardo Bader, 2012), which was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award, and the Werkraumhaus (Peter Zumthor, 2013). Fee: 40 Euros | 34 Euros (including travel by coach, guided tours, and free entrance). Booking: vai, Vorarlberger Architektur Institut, [email protected], +43-5572-511 69-9542

Entry price for the symposium 9.– EUR | Reductions 6.50 EUR

For symposium enquiries, please contact Lidiya Anastasova | Ext. -415 [email protected]

Reservations in advance are unfortunately not possible. Simultaneous translations into German will be available for talks in English.

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KUB Publication Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger’s pictures and words engage issues of power, pleasure, money, love, and death. Her photographs, large scale textual installations, and immersive multi- channel video work address the viewer through a kind of intensely spatialized visual display.

The œuvre, which has been continuously developed over several decades, will be examined from differing perspec- tives in an in-depth conversation between the artist, Beatriz Colomina (architectural theorist and historian), and Mark Wigley (architect and architectural theorist). The con- cept of the exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, and the new work which has been especially produced for it, will be examined in Yilmaz Dziewior’s introductory essay. The catalog’s comprehensive documentation of the installa- tion in generous photographic spreads, designed in close cooperation with the artist, demonstrates the enormous currency of the statements as well as the powerful forms of address within Barbara Kruger’s work.

Barbara Kruger Edited by Yilmaz Dziewior; With an essay by Yilmaz Dziewior and a conversation between Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, and Barbara Kruger German|English, approx. 136 pages, 22 x 30 cm, Hardcover with dust jacket, date of publication: December 2013 42.– EUR

KUB Online-Shop www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at

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KUB Artist’s Edition Barbara Kruger

Exclusive special editions for the Kunsthaus Bregenz are a result of close collaboration with artists and their produc- tion processes.

On the occasion of her solo exhibition Barbara Kruger has produced a limited edition archival pigment print, in which she contrasts a grainy photograph of a close-up of a human eye with a slogan that is both humorous as well as socio- and consumer critical: »Du willst es. Du kaufst es. Du ver- gisst es.« (»You want it. You buy it. You forget it.«).

Archival pigment print 40 x 60 cm, limited edition of 8 + 1 A.P., stamped by the artist: 1.800.- EUR including 10% sales tax; packaging and shipping charges extra

Please contact Caroline Schneider [email protected] Phone +43-5574-485 94-444

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Biography Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger (born 1945) lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. She was awarded the Golden Lion for her life work at the Venice Biennale 2005 and currently teaches at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

Important solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1983), Kunsthalle Basel (1984), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (1985), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1986), Serpentine Gallery, London (1994), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000) as well as the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011), the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2012), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2012).

Her work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions at venues including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1987), Centre Pompidou, Paris (1988), Tate Liverpool (2002), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2004), Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2006), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007), and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2012).

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Works in the exhibition

First floor

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Suggestions), 2013 UV-print on vinyl, floor, 21 x 23 m

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Barbara Kruger Untitled (We won’t be our own best enemy), 1986 Collage, 35.5 x 36 cm Private Collection, courtesy of Luxembourg & Dayan

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Our prices are insane!), 1987 Collage, 35 x 33.5 cm Private Collection

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Who is born to lose?), 1989 Collage, 43 x 26 cm Private Collection

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Barbara Kruger Untitled (Who is bought and sold?), 1989 Collage, 43 x 26 cm Private Collection

Barbara Kruger Untitled (We decorate your life), 1985 Collage, 35.5 x 34 cm Private Collection

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Memory is your image of perfection), 1982 Collage, 28.5 x 41 cm Private Collection

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Barbara Kruger Untitled (Are we having fun yet?), 1987 Collage, 38.5 x 30.5 cm Private Collection

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Your misery loves company), 1985 Collage, 35 x 33.5 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

Barbara Kruger Untitled (We will no longer be seen and not heard), 1986 Collage, 35.5 x 35 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

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Barbara Kruger Untitled (Who is free to choose?), 1989 Collage, 43 x 26 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Who is beyond the law?), 1989 Collage, 43 x 26 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

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Barbara Kruger Untitled (We are ordered to enter the sphere of fixation), 1985 Collage, 24 x 16 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

Barbara Kruger Untitled (We are public enemy number one), 1984 Collage, 22.5 x 14.8 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

Barbara Kruger Untitled (We don't need another hero), 1988 Collage, 8.7 x 19 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

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Barbara Kruger Untitled (You delight in the loss of others), 1982 Collage, 17.2 x 22.2 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Talk is cheap), 1985 Collage, 15 x 19.2 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Free love), 1988 Collage, 23.9 x 13.5 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

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Barbara Kruger Untitled (Who does the crime? Who does the time?), 1988 Collage, 9.9 x 23.9 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

Barbara Kruger Untitled (You kill time), 1983 Collage, 22 x 14.5 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

Barbara Kruger Untitled (You do what you can to get what you want), 1984 Collage, 22.7 x 14.4 cm Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

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Second floor

Barbara Kruger Twelve, 2004 Video projection with four projections, 15 min loop with 12 sequences with 12 conversations, dimensions variable

Barbara Kruger has filmed twelve conversations in Los Angeles, with actors and actresses reading their texts from teleprompters. The heads of the speakers are projected, larger than life, on two opposing walls in the exhibition space, so that the discussions are conducted above the heads of the exhibition visitors. The twelve emotionally charged discussions revolve around such diverse issues as family disputes, politics, everyday topics, relationship problems, and theories of contemporary art.

Below the large-scale images of the speakers, strips of texts by Barbara Kruger run through the projection that relate to the spoken texts, commenting on or questioning them.

This work by the artist physically locates visitors both spatially and in terms of content in the middle of a culture that is informed by the televisual and its genres of the soap opera and reality show, and addresses the ways in which our language and means of communication are influ- enced by these.

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Third floor

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Reminder), 2013 UV-print on PVC fabric, walls, 78 x 5 m

Facade

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Tears), 2013 Facade UV-Print on PVCmesh 20 x 20 m

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KUB Billboards Seestraße, Bregenz

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Belief + Doubt = Sanity), 2013

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Ist blinder Idealismus reaktionär?), 2013

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Gibt es ein Leben ohne Schmerz?), 2013

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Barbara Kruger Untitled (Can money buy you love?), 2013

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Know nothing, believe anything, forget everything), 2013

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze,…), 2013

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Partner and Sponsors Kunsthaus Bregenz would like to thank its partners for their generous financial support and the cultural commitment that goes along with it.

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Venue | Organizer Kunsthaus Bregenz

Director | Chief curator Yilmaz Dziewior

Chief Executive Werner Döring

Curator Rudolf Sagmeister

Curator of the KUB Arena Eva Birkenstock

Communications Birgit Albers | ext. -413 [email protected]

Press photos to download www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at

Art Education Kirsten Helfrich | ext.-417 [email protected]

Publications | Editions Katrin Wiethege | ext.-411 [email protected]

Sales Editions Caroline Schneider | ext.-444 [email protected]

Hours Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m.—6 p.m. Thursday 10 a.m.—9 p.m. 26.10.13, 10 a.m. — 6 p.m. | 01.11.13, 10 a.m. — 6 p.m. 08.12.13, 10 a.m. — 6 p.m. | 24., 25. and 31.12.13 closed 26.12.13, 10 a.m. — 9 p.m. | 01.01.14, 2 p.m. — 6 p.m. 06.01.14, 10 a.m. — 6 p.m.

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