Playing Rules
The Collections

The year 2024 brought major anniversaries for the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and the Generali Foundation. Twenty years earlier, the extraordinary site of the Museum on the Mönchsberg had been opened and become a new landmark for the State and City of Salzburg. In 2014 one of Austria’s most significant private art collections with an international focus, the Generali Foundation Collection, came to Salzburg on permanent loan and has since then remained a productive stakeholder at the Museum.

To mark these anniversaries, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in cooperation with the Generali Foundation was presenting a series of exhibitions that brought together the outstanding art collections that are preserved at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and are the subject of research: the Generali Foundation Collection, the Museum’s own holdings, the Federal Photography Collection, and the Salzburg State Collection. The spectrum ranged from works of Classical Modernism to new media, from work with historical references to work that thematizes the pressing issues of our day. What connects these collections? What social and cultural perspectives does this artistic spectrum open up? These were questions that had been addressed by the exhibition series, which was founded on two basic motifs: The social space and play.

Play is a unique way of experiencing the world. It is a metaphor for the life of the community, but also an engine of cultural change. Relishing play, we discover ourselves, our individual characteristics and abilities. On the other hand, free play will often abruptly turn deadly serious. Playful competition lets us experience the cooperative as well as antagonistic dynamics of society. We learn how rules and systems work and what it means to break and upend them.

The exhibition Playing Rules looked for the urge to play in art. Language, body, light, and air, sports and media images: these were only some of the domains that artists playfully explored and transformed with the means of improvisation and interaction. Their works illustrated how art harnesses the imagination to push the limits of the thinkable and activates the potentials of play to represent—and, not infrequently, to subvert—social realities.

With works by
Marc Adrian, Josef Bauer, VALIE EXPORT, Harun Farocki, Nilbar Güreş, Hans Haacke, Jürgen Klauke, Julius Koller, Edward Krasiński, Sigalit Landau, Angelika Loderer, Dorit Margreiter Choy, Dóra Maurer, Robert Rauschenberg, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, Franz West