In 2012 the Kunsthaus Bregenz will be presenting a classic of recent art history – Ed Ruscha – and an icon of postmodern dance and experimental film – Yvonne Rainer – as well as younger artists such as Danh Vo from Vietnam and Florian Pumhösl from Austria.

Typical for these artists are a marked interest in conceptual issues, and extra-artistic areas such as politics, society, and pop culture. In this sense the KUB will once again this year be pursuing a program committed to discussion that not only goes far beyond art-immanent discourse but also directs attention at non-Western-centered perspectives.

While Danh Vo’s interest in the culture of the country of his birth has an autobiographical impulse, Florian Pumhösl’s involvement with non-European cultures is also invariably connected with the question as to how the phenomena of Modernism has developed in Asia or Latin America.

Alongside these intercultural approaches, the KUB with its major Yvonne Rainer survey exhibition will be presenting – following VALIE EXPORT– another legendary female artist whose works deal seminally with issues of feminism and intermediality in the 20th and 21st centuries. Yvonne Rainer’s approach here is decidedly interdisciplinary, which coincides with the KUB’s fundamental orientation.

A definite highlight of the exhibition program is Ed Ruscha who, apart from a presentation of his artist books, photographs, and works on paper, will also be exhibiting paintings he is creating specially for his Bregenz show.

Parallel to the big exhibitions on the three upper floors the advanced presentation formats of the KUB Arena are to be continued and will be presenting a cooperation with a journal, a solo exhibition, a summer academy, and a cooperation with the Goethe Institute Nairobi.

While independent projects were developed for the KUB Arena when it was established in 2003, in subsequent years it generally served as an extended exhibition space for the regular Kunsthaus Bregenz solo exhibitions. However, since summer 2010 the Arena has been used for its own program of exhibitions and events that extend beyond the sphere of the visual arts to probe the areas bordering other fields of cultural production.

Following the successful cooperation with the Van Abbemuseum in Living Archives at the start of 2011, then Yona Friedman & Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz and Anfang gut. Alles gut and to close the year 2011 the presentation of the theater project Hate Radio, four interdisciplinary projects are to be specially developed for the ground floor of the Kunsthaus Bregenz in the coming year.

A cooperation with springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, one of Austria’s leading art magazines, will open the 2012 exhibition series. A project-oriented presentation will be developed on the ground floor of the Kunsthaus Bregenz to accompany the production of the magazine’s spring 2012 issue around the subject of Enduring Value. The cooperation between KUB Arena and springerin will also consider what the specific spaces are that museum and journal create and how they are used.

For the second KUB Arena 2012 project the artist Ulrike Müller (born in Vorarlberg, lives and works in New York) has been invited to develop an exhibition for the ground floor, which will be followed by a summer academy investigation into the question what ideology and ideological critique after 1989 can be in art. In cooperation with the Institute for Art and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Eva Birkenstock and Max Jorge Hinderer will be organizing a summer academy with students and international guests to diagnose “ideological constellations” of the present. Public lectures will accompany the seminar and a comprehensive reader will finally be brought out in the KUB Arena series of publications.

In fall 2012 following a research stay in Nairobi, Kenya, Eva Birkenstock with Johannes Hossfeld (Director of the Goethe Institute Nairobi) and local cultural producers will be looking at the art and cultural scenes in one of East Africa’s major economic centers. Together they will be presenting Nairobi’s art and cultural scene by means of art works, lectures, and films.

A basic concern of the KUB Arena is to react more spontaneously and flexibly to current art discourse than is possible in the major representative exhibitions with their long planning phases. On top of this the KUB Arena makes use of exhibition and mediation formats that strike out on new paths precisely in virtue of their experimental character.

YVONNE RAINER
23 | 01 - 09 | 04 | 2012

DANH VÕ
10 | 04 - 24 | 06 | 2012

ED RUSCHA
25 | 06 - 14 | 10 | 2012

FLORIAN PUMHÖSL
15 | 10 | 2012 - 20 | 01 | 2013