NPP: September 11 – 30, 2007
Exhibition │ Oskar Hansen’s Museum of Modern Art │ Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska │ Their latest collaboration is a series of 12 original posters in limited edition titled "Oskar Hansen's Museum of Modern Art”. The posters design was made in close collaboration with young German designer Ariane Spanier (www.arianespanier.com).
The study presents a hypothetical program of the “lost” museum designed by Oskar Hansen in 1966 for the competition for the contemporary art museum in Skopje. Meant to become a symbol of the city’s progress and “immortality” following the devastating earthquake on 26th of July 1963, the competition for the best design of a new art institution was organized by the Polish government as a gesture of solidarity and was open exclusively to architects from Poland and other Eastern Block countries.
Oskar Hansen’s proposal was based on peculiar assumptions: the museum was to consist of “a transformable exhibition space, able to fold completely and then unfold into various combinations, with hexagonal elements lifted by hydraulically-powered rotating telescopes.” In this way the structure would transform in horizontal and vertical dimensions at the same time. In the proposal the architect wrote: “Art in its development is unpredictable. We have assumed that a contemporary gallery should pursue the unknown in art. It shouldn’t only aim at exhibiting artworks, but also encouraging and provoking their birth.” Hansen’s design was not implemented. The jury finally selected a design submitted by a team of three Polish architects: W. Klyzewski, J. Mokrzynski and E. Wierzbicki.
The latest project by Calovski and Ivanoska is a study of multiple hypotheses surrounding reading of art historical references. It manifests a view on historical analysis involving the documentation of Hansen’s proposal and of the possible exhibition and lecture program that would have engaged artists such as Paul Thek, Mladen Stilinovic, Andrzej Szewczyk, Ana Mendieta, Ad Reinhardt, Dusan Percinkov and others. The project is also a reflection on musealization of art and construction of parallel historical narrations. What would have happened had Hansen’s utopian proposal been accepted? What kind of curatorial strategies would have been enforced by the reality of a “foldaway museum”? Can we foresee any artistic reactions to the idealistic umbrella-like platforms that were, after all, supposed not only to host but also to inspire art? These are some of the questions the new work of Ivanoska and Calovski is posing while they fantasize about alternative art history which they construct on the basis of contemporary knowledge of Central and Eastern European avant-garde art.
This project has been in development since 2005 and it was first time presented in the frame of Calovski and Ivanoska’s exhibition“Orphans of culture, legends and heroes” curated by Sebastian Cichocki at Kronika Gallery in Bytom (Poland) from May 26 until July 14, 2007.
A publication of the project published by Kronika, press to exit project space, and Veenman Publishers from Rotterdam will be available in September 2007. The publication features an extensive interview between the curator and the artists and text contributions by writer and independent curator Elena Filipovic (co-curator with Adam Szymczyk of the 5th Berlin Biennial) and Dr Andrzej Szczerski (born 1971), who currently runs the Curatorial Studies department at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. The curator of the project, Sebastian Cichocki is director of Kornika gallery and recently was the curator of the Polish Pavilion at the 52nd Art Biennale in Venice.
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