Anagrammatic Spaces: Interiors in Contemporary Art

(in English) In collaboration with the research project "Anagrammatic Spaces: Interiors in Contemporary Art" of the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst will hold a three-part series of events on issues around space and interiors in contemporary art in conjunction with the Collection on Display series of exhibitions of works from our holdings. Like the exhibitions, the research project explores designs, models, conceptualizations, and interpretations of interior spaces in contemporary art. One of the most persistent themes in contemporary art over the last twenty years has been the proliferation of work that addresses 'modernist utopias': art that takes twentieth-century architecture and design as a starting point for contemporary sculpture, installation, photography, video and research. It is conspicuous that this work only began in earnest with the end of the Cold War, but has since spread internationally. Comparable developments can also be found in contemporary dance and poetry, each with accompanying theories of what it means to repurpose pre-existing cultural artefacts. Much of this work invites us to ask other questions: what does this work tell us about our relationship to the past, and to modernism in particular? What has prompted this retrospectivity in relation to modernism, ironically the most futurist of eras? And what new cultures are being avoided in this fetish for the purity of modernism? Claire Bishop is Professor of Contemporary Art, Theory and Exhibition History at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Most recently, she published the volume Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012). She is also an author for Artforum and other publications.