The concept of nation has for a
long time played a central role in the domain of political representation.
This includes also the fine arts which, in the form of commissioned works,
but also through the concentrated purchase of certain works for state
collections, were placed in representational contexts with national pretensions.
Contemporary art, in turn, has taken up the theme of nation and national
identity in order to develop other models of representational structures
and to put hegemonic models into question. The Frankfurter Kunstverein
has been working for some time in the area of contemporary art and its
discursive intermeshing with socially relevant topics. At the end of the
nineties, young European artistic productions were characterized above
all by the fact that they reactively detected and criticized changes in
the social and political arena.
Today, an intensified turn to a more general altercation with national
representation can be discerned. The perspective of the ego gives way
to the analysis of the more abstract formation called 'society' which,
precisely in a period of globalization, is reflecting on its supposedly
national specificity.
The exhibition nation took up these ideas and gathered works
which productively and critically engage with the theme of national identity
and associated complexes such as nationalism, political populism, and
also the phenomena of transit and domestic exoticism. In the conception
of 'nation', the Frankfurter Kunstverein also proceeds from its
own location. There is scarcely any other European city which is so deeply
marked by the tension between finance capital, transit and migration.
What does nation mean in this context? How is national representation
articulated on the quotidian and official levels? What role does a politics
of symbols play in the individual self-orientation of the younger generation?
nation presented works from around thirty international artists
who engaged themselves between global thinking and national belonging
to ask what nation can still mean, or mean once again, today. |
| Thomas Bayrle, Marc Bijl, Heather Burnett,
Nathan Carter, Jason Dodge, Gili Dolev, Michael Elmgreen/ Ingar Dragset,
Keith Farquhar, Nicolas Floc'h, Jonathan Horowitz, Brian Jungen, Nina
Könnemann, Germaine Koh, Marko Lulic, Marcin Maciejowski, Josephine
Meckseper, Sarah Morris, Audrius Novickas, Marcel Odenbach, Erik Parker,
Bruno Peinado, Egle Rakauskaite, Jeroen de Rijke, Willem de Rooij, Shirana
Shahbazi, Tim Stoner, Erika Sulzer-Kleinemeier, Evren Tekinoktay, Andrei
Ujica, Mark Wallinger and David Zink Yi. |
