Thursday 10 August 2017

Documenta 14 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art - 2.




Documenta 14 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, (EMST), Athens.

Titled Learning from Athens, the exhibition wants viewers to in fact 'unlearn what we know' and to 'immerse ourselves in the darkness of not knowing instead of pretending to know enough in advance', the artist director Adam Szymczyk has said.

Politics takes centre stage. Set against the backdrop of Greece's social and economic situation, displacement, colonialism, violence and protest are among Documenta 14's central themes.

Szymczyk has said: 'The great lesson is that there isn't one lesson' no school that can dispense it and that no masters that can tell us how to live and what to do. We must assume responsibility and act as political subjects instead of simply leaving it to elected representatives'.





Synnove Persen, Sami Flag, (from Sami Flag Project), 1978

Sami artist's Sami Flag speaks of a search for identity and recognition in Norway.




The colour field aesthetic paintings that follow break the flag's colours down into a series of artworks and not only play with Barnett Newman's paintings, but also frame in a symbolic way, the task of an indigenous population forming a country out of its home.



















Stanley Whitney, 2008, (oil on linen)

Whitney's large canvases full of blocks of colour are inspired by his Mediterranean adventures




Stanley Whitney, 2008, (oil on linen)






Stanley Whitney, 2008, (oil on linen)





Stanley Whitney, 2008, (oil on linen)




Maria Ender, Transcription of Sound, 1921, (watercolour on paper)





Maria Ender, Transcription of Sound, 1921, (watercolour on paper)





Lois Weinberger, Debris Field, 2010-16

Objects excavated from the Weinberger family farmhouse in Austria, photographs, sculptures, works on paper








Weinberger's exquisite museological installation is a process of sifting through history, and consists of objects dug up from beneath her family farmhouse in the Tyrol, including plants, shoes and cat skeletons. It offers an uncanny reflection on what lies beneath the apparent safety of the domestic and the burden of built of the past century.









Weinberger describes the project as an 'ethnology'


























4 comments:

  1. Documenta seems a most thought provoking exhibition. It's good that you were able to visit and revisit. Just from reading your posts I have a sensation of overload, so I imagine that your brain must be buzzing.

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    1. The sensation of overload increased when I was writing up the posts, Olga, so that in the end I gave up, and did not include exhibits I would have like to. It's a shame, as the blog is a record of what I have seen, but it was getting too much. I did enjoy going to the exhibition however, and in the end, that's what matters.

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  2. I love Lois Weinberger's work here. It reminds me of a piece Uli made as she drove from Essen to Southern Spain collecting tiny soil samples every 50 or so miles. She displays them in tiny bottles on a horizontal rail and the colour varies so much as the soil changes from north to south...each one is a kind of geological moment. Not the same, I realise, but a record of a place.

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    1. The Weinberger room was my favourite on that floor, Avril. It's a wonderful idea and it was fascinating seeing all that was excavated.

      Ulli's piece sounds fun.

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