Mapplethorpe at eighty: Who may show bodies?
Mapplethorpe sought beauty in the body, challenging public boundaries in the process. Today, the question is also who controls these images.
→Exhibitions, artists, museums, photography and the art market.
Three exhibitions in Wien, Basel and Düsseldorf bring bodies into focus between self-determination, work and social order. Read together, they show that visibility does not yet amount to agency.
READ THE ESSAYMapplethorpe sought beauty in the body, challenging public boundaries in the process. Today, the question is also who controls these images.
→Calder’s sculptures change with air, time and viewpoint. What do they gain when we give them space?
→Between metropolis, theatre and night: Salzburg shows how artists of the interwar period observed the world around them.
→A fictional Swiss bank on trial: in Appenzell, Gabriela Löffel asks how art can investigate financial power and its narratives.
→The Folkwang did not begin with modernism alone: Osthaus’s Islamic art collection shaped his early vision of a museum spanning periods and regions.
→At Hamburger Bahnhof, Sophie Calle links memories of Berlin with the museum’s history — and creates a work for its 30th anniversary.
→Three artistic approaches at Vienna Art Week present fear as a bodily, political and social experience – and seek ways of dealing with it.
→Two exhibitions explore Karen Kilimnik’s visual universe of fairy tales, ballet and glamour – and the question of who is allowed to belong within it.
→In Appenzell, open sculptural systems meet videos about language, images and power. Two exhibitions place different emphases.
→The Wolfgang Hahn Prize honours Lee Ufan – and channels money into the Museum Ludwig’s collection. Who makes the selection, and what does it mean for the collection?
→Microbes, bodily fluids and sound: Mel e Logan invites visitors to an exhibition between art and research at the Heiligenkreuzerhof.
→Cameron Rowland explores ownership relations and institutional responsibility. New works have been announced at mumok from November.
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