calendario eventi  :: 

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20/11/2014

Wu Tsang / Collection on Display

Migros Museum, Zurich

Curator: Raphael Gygax, Curator, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Wu Tsang (b. 1982) is an artist, performer, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles (USA). His multimedia-oriented oeuvre focuses on narratives that construct identity and the self in relation to others. In particular, Tsang is interested in the socio-political dimensions of communities and is also significantly inspired by his involvement with queer, trans, and immigrant communities in Los Angeles. Evoking "the underground" as a site of cultural resistance, Tsang considers how fantasy can play an important role in representing social movements. For instance, his award-winning 2012 film Wildness documents a legendary party venue in Los Angeles, which has become a popular meeting point for the Latin American transgender community in recent years. Through magical realism and personal narrative, the film invites discussion of documentary strategies and societal circumstances. Wu Tsang's first institutional solo exhibition in Europe combines works from the years 2008 to 2014.

Tsang's oeuvre addresses a debate dating back to the start of the 1990s, about subversive strategies that can aid the undermining and transformation of common norms. This was initiated by Judith Butler's ground-breaking 1990 work Gender Trouble , in which she hypothesizes that gender identity is reinforced, as well as constructed, by a kind of ritualistic subconscious repetition of predominant ideas about its content, and that these conceptions can thus be changed by a disruption or adjustment of this performative act. In his work, Tsang makes various attempts at such a deconstruction. One defining element is the extension of Butler's structural approach to include all forms of possible discrimination.

In connection with his work on Wildness , several short films and installations were produced. From these early works, the 2008 video The Shape of a Right Statement will be shown, in which Tsang raises the questions of who is a "fully fledged" member of society, and who decides this. The 16 mm film work For how we perceived a life (Take 3) from 2012 explores the dissonances that resonate with regard to every form of cultural, social or political representation. In both works, Tsang uses a theatrical technique that simulates a break in the unit of body and voice, of the speaker and the spoken.
Two works that play with the methods of narrative cinema constitute a central point in the exhibition. Tsang's 2010 video installation DAMELO TODO (Give me Everything) is about the young refugee Teódulo Mejía who, at the age of 15, comes from El Salvador to Los Angeles, where he finds a new home at the bar Silver Platter. Here, Tsang combines fictitious and documentary elements, transforming the museum into a hybrid place, where formal, conceptual and physical prerequisites for the creation of "safe spaces" are reflected. Tsang's most recent exhibited piece, A day in the life of bliss (2014), uses the visual language and conventions of the science fiction genre to focus on identity constructions in the digital age. In this work, the American performance artist boychild plays the main role.

Wu Tsang's works have been exhibited at the Tate Modern (London), at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum (New York), at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), and at Moca and Redcat (Los Angeles). In 2012, Tsang took part in the Whitney Biennial and the New Museum Triennial (New York), the Gwangju Biennial (South Korea) and the Liverpool Biennial (Great Britain). His documentary film Wildness has received many awards, including the Grand Jury Prize at Outfest 2012.

In 2015, a JRP|Ringier publication shall be released to accompany the exhibition.

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Collection on Display
Christoph Schlingensief: Kaprow City

Curator Judith Welter

Collection on Display
presents selected works from the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst.

The third part of the current cycle, which is about excess in terms of form and motif, presents the room-filling installation Kaprow City (2006/2007) by Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010). Excess is a universal theme in art, a theme that is applied in terms of both motif and form in equal measure, in the sense of a postmodern work concept without boundaries. Schlingensief's work links in with these notions: by means of his excessive agglomerations of materials and unconventional narrations, Schlingensief creates flowing transitions between art genres. The work 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) by American artist Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) served Schlingensief as a basis for Kaprow City.
The latter was originally conceived as a walk-through installation on a revolving stage at Volksbühne in Berlin. On the occasion of his largest solo exhibition during his lifetime, at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in 2007/2008, Schlingensief added to the work in the sense of a (re-)deconstruction and supplemented the setting with sequences from the 2007 film Fremdverstümmelung, as well as other films of his.

Christoph Schlingensief's artwork is like a foray through the arts. Schlingensief worked as a film- maker, a political performance artist, a theater director, an opera director, an actor, a painter, and a columnist. In his oeuvre, he deconstructs and reconstructs complex and overlapping visual worlds that reject linearity and classical narration, and challenge the observers' reception habits. In the multimedia work-complex Kaprow City , originally produced as a walk-through installation on a revolving stage at Volksbühne in Berlin, a decisive element of transition from theater to visual art in Schlingensief's oeuvre manifests itself. The structure of the fragmented stage, which had various walk-through chambers in an outer ring, is a homage to Allan Kaprow. Kaprow's central concern was the transfer of theatrical and musical elements to visual art, so as to free it from its painterly contemplative stagnation. However, this was not to occur via artificial artistic activities, but instead via simple everyday acts, like the squeezing of an orange. The 1959 work 18 Happenings in 6 Parts is one of the most famous happenings by this artist, and its title represents his call for a new art genre. The concept of fragmentary seeing and experience was promoted by the fact that divisions of the space prevented the observer from seeing all the transpiring activities (happenings) simultaneously. For Kaprow City , Schlingensief resumed this splitting of the audience into various groups; like with Kaprow, the aspiration to see everything could not be fulfilled. Schlingensief also experimented with the incorporation of simple everyday activities, some of which were performed by people with disabilities. The actual play, with a fragmentary narrative, took place in the interior of the revolving stage, and the onlookers were able to see this from outside, as a live transmission. With Jenny Elvers in the main role, Schlingensief presented scenes from the life of Lady Diana. At its core, Kaprow City , like other works by this artist, addresses issues regarding the relationship between events and their mediality, the eye witness, and our conventions of seeing.

The reconstruction of the installation in a museum space brings about a change of function, which simultaneously becomes a deconstruction: in the exhibition space, Schlingensief creates a hermetically sealed ruin that can no longer be entered and, alongside its new sculptural function, serves as a projection screen once again. The chamber-like segments that the audience were able to enter in the original theater production have been converted into cinema rooms, where recordings from the Berlin Kaprow City production, the film Fremdverstümmelung (2007) and personal family films are interwoven to form a complex reference system. Fremdverstümmelung was part of Schlingensief's Bonn opera production Freax (2007), which he realized with disabled actors.
The inclusion of disabled people, but also unemployed people or other socially marginalized groups, is another characteristic element of Schlingensief's working method: such protagonists become agents of criticism, due to their apparent lack of any societal function.
Viewing these film fragments is often made difficult by transparent sheets, which are applied in multiple layers. Schlingensief denies the onlooker a direct view and clear images; the image often only exists within the overlays, and in the double (and multiple) exposures. These aesthetic principles are already evident in his early films: on the basis of visual and/or acoustic overlays, which place excessive demands on the observer and aim to cause one's own capacity for absorbing images to implode, an alternative mode of observation opens up, enabling new montages and narrations. In a very particular way, the comprehensive irritation necessitates an active attitude and decisiveness on the part of the observer.

Image: Wu Tsang, Wildness, 2012, Production Still: Love Ablan, Courtesy the artist, Clifton Benevento, New York, and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

Media conference: November 21, 2014, 10 am
Screening Wildness by Wu Tsang: Thursday, 20.11. 7pm (free entry, in English)

Head of Press and Public Relations
René Müller T +41 44 2772727 presse@migrosmuseum.ch

Opening: Friday, 21.11. 6–9 pm

Migros Museum
Limmatstrasse 270 CH–8005 Zurich
Hours:
Tue/Wed/Fri 11 am–6 pm
Thu 11 am–8 pm
Sat/Sun 10 am–5 pm
Admission:
Adults CHF 12
Reduced CHF 8
Thu from 5–8 pm free admission

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