Kunsthalle Basel features Goshka Macuga ~ "I Am Become Death"

Written by Gaspar Modelo Sunday, 06 May 2012 23:13

 

Basel, Switzerland - Kunsthalle Basel presents  Goshka Macuga – "I Am Become Death", on view through March 8, 2009. Goshka Macuga (b. 1967), a Polish-born artist based in London, tests and transcends the boundaries of sculpture, installation, exhibition design and photography. She ventures into a variety of disciplines, including art making, curating, art history, ethnology, psychology and esoteric science. Macuga’s many exhibition projects and publications converge in a multi-faceted oeuvre that cannot be squeezed into such pigeonholes as “politically committed” or “formalist.” In short, her work is rigorous in form and anarchistic in content.

The artist’s practice has always been marked by an interest in collaboration with other artists and cultural producers. Macuga also makes extensive use of existing cultural material: original arts and crafts; documents related to historical figures, such as artists, their patrons and their opponents; forms of exhibition display devised and applied in diverse political contexts; and references to vernacular culture. Her work predates the often insufficiently reflected inspiration that many contemporary artists draw from the history of (mostly Western European and U.S.) modernism. For Macuga, art is a tool for understanding and a blueprint for social change. Her discursive scenarios involve deconstruction of our society’s cultural conditioning and defy the currently dominant mode of artistic practice as a market-driven activity that is detached from a broader social practice of making and marginalized as a plaything of the art world.

Goshka Macuga’s first institutional solo exhibition in continental Europe, at the Kunsthalle Basel, comprises an ensemble of photographic works incorporating documents and images selected by the artist from the archives of the Tate Gallery in London, The Warburg Institute at University of London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Kunsthalle Basel. The exhibition’s title, I Am Become Death, invokes a scene from the sacred Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita (The Song of God). This line from the epos (‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’) was quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project during World War II, on seeing the scale of destruction after the Trinity nuclear test at White Sands Missile Range near Alamogordo in New Mexico, on July 16, 1945.

In her new group of works, Goshka Macuga also reflects on the history of exhibition display. Road to Victory, an exhibition of 1942 mounted by the MoMA in New York, while the Manhattan Project was well under way, sought to promote America’s military strength and helped to consolidate the rationale of a nation embarking on a major war. The show was conceived as ‘a procession of photographs of the nation at war’ by Edward Steichen in a setting designed by Herbert Bayer and with texts written by the American poet and author Carl Sandburg. Later in 1955, Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition at the MoMA aimed to illustrate the many facets of mankind—love, work and leisure—in the universal quest for peace and happiness. The show ignored and leveled out the inevitable political contradictions entailed in such an agenda and instead promoted an idealized vision of abstract “humanity.” Supposedly best embodied in the American notion of democracy, it was represented in a selection of photographs, showing human beings as if seen by a naturalist.  

Solo exhibitions (selection): 2008: Goshka Macuga, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich / 2007: Objects in Relation, Art Now, Tate Britain, London; What’s In a Name, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York / 2006: Mula sem Cabeça (Headless Mule), How to Live Together, 27th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo; Sleep of Ulro, The Furnace Commission, A Foundation, Liverpool / 2005: Goshka Macuga, Kate MacGarry, London.

Group exhibitions (selection): 2008: Turner Prize exhibition, Tate Britain, London; The Great Transformation – Kunst und taktische Magie, Frankfurter Kunstverein; Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Art Gallery, London; When Things Cast No Shadow – 5th berlin biennial, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin / 2007: Les Palais Des Etoiles: These Are Also Wings (performance with DADADANDY), Selfridges, London / 2006: We’ve Lost Our Heart and Mind, Event Gallery, London; Moving in Architecture, (selected by Cyril Lepetit), Camden Arts Centre, London and Curzon Cinema Soho, London.  Visit Kunsthalle Basel at : www.kunsthallebasel.ch

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