Harun Farocki Estate Making Spaces

For the new exhibition of works from the collections, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg is focusing on the interaction between artists and the architectural, institutional, and social spaces and how they are produced, appropriated, and criticized. Visitors are invited to discover nine artist spaces and to experience the works in them in their singularity. This selection from the Museum’s collections focuses on new acquisitions, particularly through the Generali Foundation.

The examination of spaces by artists stands in a long tradition. While the initial focus was on realistic representation, leading amongst other things to the invention of central perspective in the fifteenth century, works in the twentieth century began to directly interact with space. Artists also started to investigate the museum itself and the conventions for observing art. The 1960s and 1970s in particular saw works of art as a critical examination of the museum as an institutional and physical space in which art was collected, presented, preserved, and mediated. Artists problematized the selection, evaluation, and historicization of art. The aim of making art accessible to people of all social classes, regardless of origins, gender, or religious affiliation, reflects the way in which the perception or production of space is linked to social and political negotiations. 

This exhibition presents new acquisitions and spatial installations from the museum’s collections to demonstrate the diversity in the artistic understanding of space. Apart from works dealing with sensory perception and the physical experience of space, it will include pieces devoted to institutional, fictional, or virtual spaces. The artists show how the spaces surrounding us are created, structured, and controlled, revealing perspectives that engage with existing spaces or even offering alternative spaces and the possibility of active participation.