Modernologies

What has prompted contemporary artists to investigate modernity and modernism over the course of the past decades? Modernologies set out to explore artistic responses to modernity as a socio-political movement aspiring to cultivate a universal language. Diverging conceptions of modernity and postcolonial studies have led to the notion of ‘multiple modernities’. Against this backdrop, this exhibition advocated neither a ‘new formalism’ nor a ‘return to abstraction’. Its aim was neither to discover hitherto unknown or largely forgotten currents of modernism. On the contrary, it fundamentally challenged the conditions, constraints, and consequences of modernity, exposes ambivalences, attempts to develop new readings of the rhetoric of modernity and the concomitant grammar of modernism.

A younger generation of artists is increasingly addressing the legacy of modernity and modernism and the failure of the utopia associated with these terms. This raised the question about the artists’ relationship to the promises and formal languages of modernity. How can this historical era even be critically reflected in and be subjected to a re-evaluation? Modernologies unfolded a cartography of alternative viewpoints and narratives, lines of conflicts and unresolved contradictions. More than one hundred works and projects by more than thirty artists and collectives established a new ‘mapping of the critique of modernity’.

The works featured in the exhibition were organized around three leitmotifs. One was ‘the production of space’, illustrated by projects that explore the conflicts and correspondences between the architectural space of modernity and its social and political space. The second, ‘the concept of a universal language’, took into account modernism’s ideology and the attempts by movement leaders to create a universal language in the form of abstract aesthetic symbols and forms. The third leitmotif, ‘the politics of display’, illustrated how artists use the exhibition format and works of modern art themselves as a medium, in this way challenging the notion of the display and playing the role of quasi-curators. These three generic ideas were not seperated in individual spatial sections of the exhibition, but fostered countless dialogues across its works and the overall subject in a multidimensional manner.

In the accompanying publication an additional layer was added through comprehensive essays by Sabine Breitwieser, Cornelia Klinger and Walter Mignolo exploring the ideology of aesthetic modernity—autonomy, authenticity and alterity, and delving into interrelationships between modernity and coloniality, the ‘other side, the dark side of modernity’. The artists were also be given voice through short interviews conducted by Andrè Rottmann.