Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

How do contemporary artists reflect on the museum as a place for collecting and presentation? The curator Thomas Thiel asked himself this question and conceived Museum off Museum for the Bielefeld Art Society. The exhibition aims to show the strategies artists use to present their subjective view of museum exhibition in the globalized world.

It treats the overlapping of artistic objects from various cultures and epochs. The French-Algerian artists Kader Attia, for example, combines historical objects with modern objects and European with non-European art, and so aims to draw attention to the political and religious tensions to which cultures are subject.

The artist collective Slavs and Tartars directs our attention to the regions east of the Berlin Wall to Asia and seeks in its works connection between various cultures that seem incompatible in their religious and political views. In the Obst installation Not Moscow Not Mecca, watermelons stand for both the embattled Caucasus region of Russia and for the home countries of immigrants, as, for example, Turkey or North Africa.

And Camille Henrot, who received the Silver Lion at the 2013 Venice Biennial, is represented by, among others, her work La Grosse Fatigue (The Great Weariness), a sound-image collage that depicts the history of the universe based on a Google search.