Group Exhibition
Museum of Display
20 May - 3 July 2011

Museum of Display is the second of three presentations articulating the story of a fictional museum, an interplay of definitions of 'art' and the 'institution' in an accelerated scenario of rise, self-interrogation, fall, and possible rejuvenation. These presentations bring together works that make specific claims to how they want to be seen and understood, that project specific notions of the institutional space that would accommodate them. These demands and positions intersect throughout the series in distinct images of the 'museum', in models of how art can be shown and experienced.

The first episode, Museum of Speech, mapped out the model of a porous institution, traversed and resonated by the 'voice' of the artist, a de-centred and deregulated space for spontaneity and divergence. The last episode, A Slowdown at the Museum (2.9 - 23.10.2011), will see the 'real world' return in the form of a strike that interrupts the continuous history-writing that upholds the 'museum' and puts political disturbance centre-stage. In between, Museum of Display asks what is being shown when art is exhibited. The works and practices here take the showing of art as medium, as object of negotiation or contention, as a constitutive split between neutrality and fabrication – the fabrication of criteria, perspectives and frames.

Museum of Display presents works and interventions by Nico Dockx, Josef Dabernig, Metahaven, Jill Magid, Isabelle Cornaro, Neil Beloufa, Kris Kimpe and a text by Helmut Draxler.

Image: Josef Dabernig, excursus on fitness, 2010, courtesy Andreas Huber Vienna and Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam

More information: www.extracity.org