Kommentar von Silvia Eiblmayr, Jiří Ševčík, Branka Stipancić, Adam Szymczyk, Georg Schöllhammer
Kommentar von Silvia Eiblmayr, Jiří Ševčík, Branka Stipancić, Adam Szymczyk, Georg Schöllhammer
Outline portraits of four members of the international jury for Kontakt - The Art Collection of Erste Bank Group of contemporary and modern art: Silvia Eiblmayr, Jiří Ševčík, Branka Stipanić, Adam Szymczyk, Georg Schöllhammer
Silvia Eiblmayr
“The study of the art of the former socialist, now post-socialist, countries has always formed part of my interests as a curator, something that is also reflected in the work on building up this collection. In this context an experience I have regularly had when making exhibitions should also prove fruitful: namely, that when artistic works are placed in a selected context or special thematic setting they become aesthetically productive and unlock meanings never previously noticed. The intention is that, by means of focussed cross-connections, the collection should make a hermeneutic contribution to the historic and current understanding and interpretation of those intellectual, cultural and political fields that the countries involved share with each other or through which they differ.”
Silvia Eiblmayr is an art historian and the director of Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck (A). From 1988 to 2004 she worked as a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Cologne and at Zurich University. She has been a visiting professor at London University, the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich and the University for Visual and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria. She has published numerous texts on modern and contemporary art including “Die Frau als Bild“ - Der weibliche Körper in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (“Woman as Picture” - The Female Body in 20th Century Art) Dietrich-Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1993.
Jiří Ševčík
“I expect that the collection will fill a gap that exists in most of the museum collections, by showing some displaced phenomena from the subconscious. I am looking forward to the collection containing a high concentration of significant works of Eastern European art, which are based on a different reality, different experiences and different times. The collection can also show what we do not really want to learn about each other. And, above all, it can provide impulses by processing new experiences that still lie ahead of us. By this I mean that we will have to fit into our experience something which, surprisingly, is also our reality, and that we will have learn how to live with something, that, while it is not completely foreign, still doesn’t correspond with established standards.”
Jiří Ševčík was born in Czechoslovakia in 1940. Fom 1962 to 1965 he was, among other things, editor-in-chief of the magazine Architektura CSR. He taught at the Institute for Theory and History of Art and Architecture in Prague School of Architecture from 1966 to 1989. From 1990 to 1993 he was head curator of the Gallery of the City of Prague and from 1993 to 1996 director of the modern and contemporary art collection in the National Gallery Prague. Since 1996 he has been vice-rector of the Academy of Applied Art in Prague and, in addition, since 1997 he been head of the research centre and archive of Czech art.
Branka Stipanić
“It is a known fact that there are collections of contemporary art in numerous Eastern and South-Eastern European countries lying in the storerooms because museums have no adequate buildings in which to show such collections to the public. Some examples are the remarkable ArtEast Collection 2000+ of the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana, as well as the collection of international art of the Contemporary Art Museum in Zagreb. I strongly believe that the collection will connect different cultural spaces which have, until recently, been rather isolated and that it will present to the public artworks that - for reasons that had nothing to do with art - have remained unknown for a number of years. Furthermore, I have no doubt that the collection will encourage numerous discussions and will contribute to a better understanding of contemporary art.”
Branka Stipanić is an art critic and free-lance art historian who lives and works in Zagreb (Croatia). From 1983 to 1993 she was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Zagreb from 1993 to 1996. Exhibitions she has curated include “Baltic Times“ in the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb and in Galerie im Taxispalais (2001), Chinese Whispers“ in Apexart in New York (2000), “Aspects/Position“ im MUMOK Vienna, 1999 and “The Future is now“ in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (1999). Her most recent publications are “Mangelos nos. 1 to 9 ½” (Museu Serralves, Porto, 2003); “Connections - Contemporary Artists from Australia” (HDLU, Zagreb, 2002).
Adam Szymczyk
“The Erste Bank Collection is taking a distinctly different and new direction by opening up to art from Eastern and Central Europe. The geographic area on which the collection focuses is not (and should not be) too narrowly defined. Its main orientation is art that has, to a large extent, so far escaped the attention of major (in this case Western European) private and public collections. We believe that the collection could make an important contribution towards a broader understanding of phenomena in contemporary art of the last forty years. Many works that will become a part of the collection are hardly known in Western Europe, even to art professionals. Therefore the collection will have an important educational aspect and, hopefully, will make it possible to redefine some of the existing dogmas of recent art history.”
Adam Szymczyk was born in 1970 in Piotrkow Trybunalski in Poland. This curator and author is the current director of the Kunsthalle Basel. From 1994 to 1995 he was curatorial assistant for film and video at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. He was also curator for the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw from 1997 to 2003. In the past decade he has worked on exhibitions and publications of and about artists such as Pawel Althamer, Douglas Gordon, Susan Hiller, Job Koelewijn, Edward Krasinski, Claudia and Julia Mueller, Gregor Schneider, Piotr Uklanski, Krzysztof Wodiczko. He was curator for the following group exhibitions among others: ”Roundabout” (CCA Warsaw 1998), ”Amateur” (with co-curators Mark Kremer and Charles Esche, Kunstmuseum Goeteborg 2000) ”Painters’ Competition” (Galeria Bielska BWA, Bielsko-Biala 2001), ”Hidden In a Daylight” (together with Joanna Mytkowska and Andrzej Przywara, Cieszyn 2003).
Georg Schöllhammer
“What particularly interests me about this collection - in addition to the hope that it may help to correct a certain imbalance evident in the writing of art history of recent decades - is the reflection on the consequences of a ‘global cultural flow’. The collection will thematically concentrate something and then release it again and allow it to work in different contexts, also in the region of origin. And this will be accompanied by research grants, publications, a documentation of context material and a well though-out series of additional measures that are intended to have a local effect.
Something frequently overlooked in the current version of the universal talk about the globalisation of art and in many private collections is particularly important to the founding jury: namely that the ethos of locality is a Eigenheit specific quality of artistic life.
Our aim would therefore be to narrate the history of contemporary art in this collection as a history of “neighbourhoods” i.e. of more or less isolated and unstable systems of reference. We hope as a result to also be able to contribute to a history of recent art as a technique that produces locality. At the same time we hope that this viewpoint will help to reveal the extent of the role played in the production of the respective categories by artists, intellectuals, museum experts, gallery owners, local politics and the social, media and economic field of tension.
My hope is that, in building up the collection over the next few years, we may succeed in working in this direction. Although it may sound paradoxical, I would describe this as a political task.”
Georg Schöllhammer is director of tranzit Österreich, a culture journalist and curator. From 1988 to 1994 he wrote for the Austrian daily newspaper “Der Standard“. Since 1992 Schöllhammer has lectured on the theory of contemporary art as a visiting professor at the University for Visual and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria In addition he was responsible as curator for the international cooperation project “translocation (new) media/art“ and was co-curator of the festival “du bist die welt“ at the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna summer festival) 2001 and of exhibitions in Yerewan and Sofia in 2002 As editor-in-chief with responsibility for the text content of “springerin - Hefte für Gegenwartskunst“ Schöllhammer has for many years also devoted attention to cultural themes in Central Europe. He is the publisher of a series of publications of documenta 12 that will appear from 2005.