Making Spaces
From the Collections

Exclusive spaces had been reserved for nine artists and thirty-five works. Visitors were invited to experience the works presented in the differently designed artists' spaces.

The confrontation with space has a long artistic tradition. While the initial focus was on realistic representation, leading amongst other things to the invention of perspective in the fifteenth century, works appeared in the twentieth century that interacted directly with space. Artworks now also investigated the museum itself and the conventions for observing art. The 1960s and 1970s in particular saw works of art that were directly critical of the museum as an institutional and physical space in which art was collected, presented, stored, and communicated. Artists looked at the problem of 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, reflected the way in which the perception or production of space was linked to social and political processes.

This exhibition used 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 included pieces devoted to institutional, fictional, or virtual spaces. The artists showed 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.

Artists: Lothar Baumgarten, Maria Eichhorn, Harun Farocki, Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann, Goran Trbuljak, David Tudor & Composers Inside Electronics, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Heimo Zobernig