Panther Reading Group 

As part of Mathias Poledna‘s exhibition, we would like to continue our Panther Reading Group by dedicating ourselves to reading texts that deal with topics related to the exhibition and talking about them together over a drink.

Through Karel Císar’s text Modernology. Art after Postmodern Art (2011), we would like to reflect on the concept of modernity. Císar, who also repeatedly responds to Mathias Poledna’s works in this essay, understands modernism less as an epoch limited in time, but rather as a project or an approach that is not restricted in time or even completed.

Furthermore, we would like to use Andrea Fraser’s essay From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique (2005) to discuss institutional critique in the 1970s and 1990s, and subsequently, what Frazer understands as the institutionalization of critique. Based on the spatial characteristics of HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Poledna combines different levels of abstraction and, among other things, he sheds light on the complex relationships between institutional critique and neo-conceptual strategies.

While the first generation of institutional critique in the late 1960s and 1970s – with artists such as Michael Asher, Daniel Buren and Dan Graham – applied conceptual approaches of both an immaterial and physical nature to institutional structures, thereby challenging exhibition practice, the so-called second wave of institutional critique in the 1990s, represented by artists such as Tom Burr, Renée Green, Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson, placed a stronger focus on the methods of knowledge production and dissemination in museums. This generation examined classification systems and the implicit roles attributed to artists.

Pre-registration is requested by 2.10.2024: cf@​halle-​fuer-​kunst.​at