Without Borders
Tallinn, 21st until 25th September 2005
For or meeting in Tallinn we purposed to prove with a sort of welcoming cocktail the new ly opening art museum KUMU. Art museums are strange creations. Their traditionell role as an archiv of art works, which gave space to that what should represent art history, as carrier of history, as an educational establishment, as cult site of a civic public, as place of aesthetical experience, as a machine producing art, are on the test bench today and once again. Doubts in the task of the museum, debates about their outlook accompagny the new buildings. It seems as if the institution museum searches for a new face, for a new function, meanwhile still being on the heels of the old museum. Beween the playful staging of the atomized art scene, beween event and theatralization still nests the old fiction being able to present art as a homogenious system, as an order of art history. Because this idea became quite uncertain, the museum seems to seek refuge in attack. The terrain is widening: instead of being the destination of a trip to the art, museums mutate to stations for the departing phantasy. What does it mean to display art, producing sense? Who is inside, who remains outside? The questioning of the institution museum is linked with the questioning of the public sphere as forum and carrier of consensuns in a time wherecommunities became more fragile and fugitive. In lectures and in many talks these topics were discussed in Tallinn, even so our prologue for the new museum had to change last minute into an epilogue for the so far used exhibition space of the museum. And there in the Rotermannis Salt Storage building a exhibition was set up, a improvisation which once again brought very differnt things under the roof top of the exhibition site: in the unconcealed inconsistency of the works and gestures a (ironical) repetition of the undertaking of every museum, every show, when works with contradicting concepts of sense seem reconciliated in the aesthetical consciousness of the viewer.
Partcipants:
Renate Anger, Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, Hartmut Böhm, Monika Brandmeier, Heinrich Brummack, Dietrich Helms, Sibylle Hofter, Hetty Huisman, Tatjana Ilic, Katharina Karrenberg, Silke Leverkühne, Rune Mields, Una Moehrke,Willi Otremba, Marica Presic, Norbert Radermacher, Eva-Maria Schön, Anna Tretter, Selman Trtovac, Elisabeth Wagner, Michael Willhardt
Guests:
Monika Bartholomé, Sabine Baumann, Hannes Böhringer, Ulrike Ettinger, Kadi Estland, Cristina Fessler, Barbara Hammann, Sirje Helme, Ega Hiroshi, Harald Hofmann, Kristina Järvelaid, Naomi Kanaoka, Külli Kask, Joannes Késenne, Katrin Koskava, Andres Kurg, Raoul Kurvitz, Mari Laanemets, Marko Laimre, Zinaida Medevedeva, Alexander Nikolic, Cédric Noel, Jüri Ojaver, Johannes Saar, Ene-Liis Semper, Roswitha Siewert, Jaan Toomik, Eric van Hove, Jasper Zoova