Exhibition
About Beauty
21 Positions
Sat, Mar 19–Sun, May 15, 2005
Visitors purchasing a ticket for the Performing Arts programme can also visit the exhibition on the same day free of charge.
From the baroque opulence of the visionary artist Matthew Barney to the ravaged realism of Zhuang Hui's installation, "Chasan County"; here bodies, time and space become material. These works invite the audience to enter a world of visual puns and principles helping to consider theories through their confronting positions.
New commissioned works by Samta Benyahia (Saint Denis, France), Jens Haaning (Berlin/Vordingborg, Denmark), Hans-Peter Feldmann (Düsseldorf) in co-operation with babel, Michael Lin (Paris/Taipei), Qin Yufen (Berlin/Beijing) Zhu Jinshi (Berlin/ Beijing) as well as works by Matthew Barney (New York), Heri Dono (Jakarta), Rotimi Fani-Kayode & Alex Hirst, Katarzyna Kozyra (Berlin/Warsaw), Liu Dan (New York/ Beijing) at the Museum für ostasiatische Kunst, Berlin-Dahlem, Liu Zheng (Beijing), David Medalla (Bracknell, Great Britain), Shirin Neshat (New York), Nam June Paik (New York), Ravinder Reddy (Visakhapatnam, India), RongRong & i n r i (Beijing), Cindy Sherman (New York), Shi Chong (Beijing), Wang Gongxin & Lin Tianmiao (Beijing), Zhuang Hui (Beijing).
"On Beauty" attempts to offer neither a classification of universal standards nor to portray great art traditions. On the contrary, the works aim to show how individual artists are reconsidering and presenting beauty in new ways. Mythology and technology, dreams and death, the body and decay, transcendence and public space: around all these themes visual points of attraction have emerged that do not correspond to standard ideals of beauty but nevertheless radiate immense sensual presence.
"The Documenta will also be beautiful." As this statement by Documenta curator Roger M. Buergel indicates, art has rediscovered beauty as a theme. Since the 1990s, critics of the art establishment have again been examining the relationship between beauty and art from a feminist, postmodernist and inter-cultural perspective. The debate on the significance of beauty in different cultures will help to emancipate the concept - at long last - from the western philosophical tradition.
The exhibition "On Beauty" bears witness to all these developments and goes beyond simply presenting a variety of positions in an exhibition hall. Here, artistic interventions change the appearance of the entire building: Michael Lin transforms the foyer floor into a brilliantly coloured room-filling painting with huge flowers that positively engulf the viewer. With filigree Arabic ironwork on the central window front, Samta Benyahia presents a surprising interpretation of the building. And the city itself becomes part of the project, too. With a provocative poster campaign in Neukölln and Zehlendorf, Jens Haaning is combining Western advertising aesthetics, with their emphasis on the body, with Arabic script, thus giving a different twist to the exhibition theme and showing the inner conflict that (the instrumentalisation of) beauty has always borne within itself.
Wu Hung, the exhibition curator, taught at Harvard University before being appointed director of the Center for the Arts of East Asia at the University of Chicago.
