2008 TransAktion

Sculptures of transition

Series of exhibitions at the art centre weltecho Chemnitz 2008

The gallery of the art centre „weltecho“ as well as different places in the public space of Chemnitz will be scene of a series of international art exhibtitions in 2008. The artists from Argentina, China, Germany, Poland and Switzerland will show there installations and urban interventions. Their artistic points of view towards engineering, industrial culture and labour should converge with the place of the exhibition - the former „Chamber of Engineering“ of the former „Karl-Marx-Town“ - and activate its historical contents. The project departs from Joseph Beuys‘ concept of „social sculpture“. Its task is to stimulate the thinking concerning the connections between social and artistic production and actual rgional and global developments.
The curator Volkmar Billig has invited fi ve artists with international reputation: Eduardo Molinari (Argentina), Olaf Nicolai (Germany), Yin Xiuzhen (China), Hannes Rickli (Switzerland) and Roman Dziadkiewicz (Poland). The artists are essentially inspired by the questioning of contemporary contexts and possibilities of art in general. They all work in direct relation to actual space, its historical contents and inscribed experiences. They meet in use and artistic transformation of technical images and artefacts, in dealing with phenomena of industrial and media production and in questioning the resulting confi gurations in society, art and labour, although the methods of their artistic appropriations, installations, performances and social interactions clearly differ from each other.
Their common reference to local and historical contexts on the one hand, the difference of method and formal solutions on the other, as well as the different countries of origin and their specifi c cultural infl uences, all these elements promise - referring to the working place in Chemnitz - an interesting, many-sided and surprising debate over the actual social upheavels and aestetic processes. The fi ve successive exhibitions anticipate a kaleidoscope of artistic perspectives, which do refl ect global as well as regional effects of contemporary developments. Here different points of view will meet and react productively to each other. Especially this productive meeting of different cultural and artistic viewpoints opens the possibility to sound actual potentials of the Chemnitz cultural region and to have an effect on cultural, political and social processes on its agenda. Instead of only re-using a former industrial space and landscape, its disposition to refl ect global social developments shall be considered as much as its possible function as a laboratory of alternative views and ways of thinking. At best the Chemnitz „Chamber of Engineering“ could stimulate a re- and new thinking of current concepts of art and labour.
A book about the subject with contributions by the artists and authors concerned as well as further materials will presumably come out in June 2008 in the „Verlag für moderne Kunst“, Nürnberg.