- Erste Bank and its Central and Eastern European daughter banks can look back on a very long tradition of collecting and promoting art. But our collection no longer related to current tendencies in the production of art and therefore did not meet the criteria of the international art market. For this reason we had our collection evaluated two years ago by Rainer Fuchs, the deputy director and academic head of MUMOK. On the basis of his thorough and critical study the partner banks in Central and Eastern Europe decided to formulate a joint strategy that would enable them to concentrate their activities in the area of collecting. We have, so to speak, embarked upon a new beginning.

- What is being shown in MUMOK – and it is important to emphasize this fact – are the first steps in our new activity as a collector. Individual works suggest a direction through the quality of the erratic and the particular that they bring with them. The exhibition is more a suggestion of the future than the reality of a collection. MUMOK invited us to make this exhibition. After lengthy discussion with the art advisory council we gladly accepted this invitation. On one major condition, however: it seemed most important to us to express from the very start the international nature and the cross-border aspect of our collecting policy. For this reason we decided to hold the exhibition in two different locations at the same time, in the tranzit workshops in Bratislavan and in Vienna. We were not just interested in the symbolic content of this move, we were in fact more concerned with extending the contact between two cities that is still experienced far too little.

- As a bank our business focusses on Central and Eastern Europe. In terms of investigation by art historians and a functioning art market this region is still an unknown quantity. We developed our new collecting policy out of this need. This means, to a certain extent, reformulating art history and thus questioning the Western European canon of art. With this in mind we offer professional conservation, research and presentation of progressive art from the 1960s to the present day. The art we collect comes from a geopolitical area where it is rarely given the opportunity to present itself in an international context. Additionally, and this is something unique, the intention is that the collection should become a platform for dialogue, i.e. should to work on vital themes that are important to the formation of an identity for this region.

- Well, we certainly want to build up an internationally successful collection that represents something of value. An integral aspect of successful collections is that, in terms of their value, the individual art works profit from being part of the collection. But you cannot remove our collection from its context. This is not possible in this cultural region and to do this would not achieve a manifestation of the works.

- For me this is a question of the process, of how an art work becomes a part of our collection. The extensive in-depth discussions of the autonomous art advisory council guarantee that no pseudo “power to define” can develop. We are not interested in the formulation of a single large history and biography but rather several smaller ones that are narrated and produced by this region and its artworks. We think it important to express both the connections and also the fractures between the different countries. This entire geopolitical area is often discussed simply as the "East" , and many people forget in the process that it offers a rich diversity and plurality that is hardly shown anywhere at present.

- We are, thank heaven, no longer the only ones that support and buy art in this region. Our art advisory council did not take an easy approach to deciding about the price for the art works. It anticipated the art market, so to speak. We regard paying art market prices as a recognition of the quality of the art works and a gesture of fairness. We don’t demand an eastern European discount!

- We are not the kind of people who buy and hoard. One of our primary concerns is that this art should live with the region it comes from, that it should be discussed, that it should continue to work and that it should be integrated and replayed in the local context. This collection should be one that is used a great deal, by local curators for example, who work with local references and then allow them to become part of contemporary production. With the means at our disposal we deliberately promote and support projects that take place in a local context. Our collecting policy is not isolated but forms part of Erste Bank Group's broad-based cultural and social involvement policy of which the cross-border cultural initiative tranzit is a very important element. Through this initiative we support the infrastructure for the local production of art, augmented by our collecting policy and, of course, the classic promotion of art.

- In the sense that our collecting budget is not spent entirely on acquisitions, part is used to relate the collection to the region with the intention that it should be perceived as a cultural area whereas at present the way it is perceived is determined primarily by the economy. We wish to consciously provide an antipole to this. We also view our collecting strategy as a political statement in the struggle against the marginalisation of art and culture in the transformation societies and in the battle against a kind of nationalism that is, at times, most aggressive and that seeks to exclude everything that is different and diverse.