Modernologies. Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism

What has prompted contemporary artists to investigate modernity and modernism over the course of the past decades? This publication accompanying the exhibition Modernologies (Barcelona, September 2009–January 2010) sets out to explore artistic responses to modernity as a socio-political movement aspiring to cultivate a universal language. Diverging conceptions of modernity and the knowledge gained through postcolonial studies in recent years have led to the notion of ‘multiple modernities’.

Against this backdrop, this exhibition advocates neither a ‘new formalism’ nor a ‘return to abstraction’. Its aim is neither to discover hitherto unknown or largely forgotten currents of modernism. On the contrary, it fundamentally challenges 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. What is these artists’ relationship to the promises and formal languages of modernity? How can this historical era even be critically reflected in and be subjected to re-evaluation?

Modernologies unfolds a cartography of alternative viewpoints and narratives, lines of conflicts and unresolved contradictions. About one hundred works and projects by more than thirty artists and collectives establish a new ‘mapping of the critique of modernity’ to which an additional layer is added through comprehensive essays exploring the ideology of aesthetic modernity and delving into interrelationships between modernity and coloniality.

With works by Anna Artaker, Alice Creischer/Andreas Siekmann, Domènec, Katja Eydel, Ângela Ferreira, Andrea Fraser, Isa Genzken, Dan Graham and Robin Hurst, Tom Holert with Claudia Honecker, Marine Hugonnier, IRWIN, Runa Islam, Klub Zwei, John Knight, Labor k3000, Louise Lawler, David Maljkovic, Dorit Margreiter, Gordon-Matta Clark, Gustav Metzger, Christian Philipp Müller, Henrik Olesen, Paulina Olowska, Falke Pisano, Mathias Poledna, Florian Pumhösl, Martha Rosler, Armando Andrade Tudela, Marion von Osten, Stephen Willats, and Christopher Williams