Mia san mia. Hans Haacke & Works from the Collection

I had invited Hans Haacke to a retrospective of his work in the form of a major exhibition, his first in Vienna, and had already worked intensively on it. Instead, he decided to focus on “a single problem area: how the country deals with its history and national identity. More than I care for,” so argued the artist, “these questions stir up emotions both in Austria and Germany.” In his mind, the works he produced for Graz in 1988 and 1996 had unfortunately lost none of their relevance at the time of his exhibition in Vienna.[1]

Questions of the construction of identity, which are also evident in his project TO THE POPULATION (1999/2000) for the Reichstag building in Berlin, were to be at the center of his presentation in the small hall. Under the title Mia san mia (We are who we are), Hans Haacke took up this theme from a contemporary perspective in an installation created especially for this exhibition. With this new Viennese work, Haacke created a temporal-spatial framework for his Berlin project together with the Graz works, the design for the Memorial for Victims of National Socialism at the Military Target Practice Range “Feliferhof” (1996) and And You Were Victorious After All (1988), both conceived for public space.

Hans Haacke (1936 Cologne, DE–since 1965 New York) was originally concerned with physical and biological systems. Soon his practice turned more to analysis of and reflection on socio-political structures. The sometimes-fierce debates arising from his projects, such as in Graz, where his work even fell victim to an arson attack, he considers as part of his artistic work. Along with the Graz projects, the iconic Condensation Cube (1963/65) and the installation Circulation (1969), were acquired for the Generali Foundation Collection.

The two latter works stem from the early period, when Haacke, informed by systems theory, explored the dynamics of fluids, were also shown, together with the parallel exhibition of selected Works from the Generali Foundation Collection presented in the main hall of the exhibition space.

[1] At this time, Austria was governed by a coalition of the Austrian People’s Party and the Freedom Party.