20 Years of Kontakt
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Kontakt was founded as a non-profit art association in 2004 in order to collect artworks and secure a previously neglected aspect of cultural heritage through professional conservation, research on its featured artists, exhibitions, publications, and educational projects. To mark the 20th anniversary of its establishment, Kontakt is reexamining the main artistic approaches that have shaped it over the years and the ways in which such approaches are even more relevant today.
Kontakt’s focus is on art that is highly specific and unique. European culture at large, however, will remain deprived of these riches until it finds ways of broadening the scope of its perception and dialogue to integrate the inputs of these artists, who have been contributing significant works to the history of European art since the late 1950s. Several among these works address models of the future and the possibility of enriching present reality through imaginary modes of thought, thereby embodying a quest for alternative views of reality—or, in the words of Slovak artist Július Koller, for a new “cultural situation.” With its name, Kontakt pays tribute to the work of Július Koller—who created “KONTAKT (Anti-Happening)” (1969) as well as multiple similarly titled work series from the late 1960s onwards. Koller also, in one of his manifestos, called for a “cosmo-humanist” situation as a mode of existence that, viewed in light of our crisis-ridden contemporary world order, is indeed still quite relevant today.
Kontakt’s 20th anniversary serves to raise questions about possible future scenarios posed from artistic as well as institutional perspectives. The latter relate to climate justice tendencies and resource scarcity, whose effects also impact current practices in terms of conceiving and realizing exhibitions. Attention is hence being paid to dematerialized art, which makes up a large share of the Kontakt’s holdings and encompasses mail art, performances, happenings, visual and experimental poetry, and sound-based works from the 1960s and 1970s. These ephemeral manifestations in time were captured on paper, film, and photographs. Many of these artistic ideas were never realized, thus remaining mental experiments. With their dematerialized art, Július Koller and his fellow artists created a flexible and operative artistic tool for the initiation of critical discourse within communist countries in order to establish contact (Kontakt) with other colleagues in and outside the region, suggesting an alternative future for a universal community.
Current geopolitical events and constant war trigger feelings similar to the powerlessness and passivity felt in the wake of the Prague Spring movement’s collapse, evoking calls for alternatives in an immediate future. The realm of art is one of those areas where frustration with democracy and subjective institutional failure vis-à-vis climate change have manifested themselves. The urgency of setting limits in this context, as well, stems from how numerous art institutions have contributed to CO2 emissions and global warming over the years. Kontakt will attempt to reflect upon this situation to which it, too, has contributed—which raises the question as to what significant changes are necessary and possible in order to place art institutions’ work on a sustainable footing.
For its 20th anniversary, Kontakt will attempt to focus on those utopian moments and ideas that are inscribed upon the dematerialized art projects of the 1960s and ’70s by way of exhibitions, films, workshops, and projects in specific media outlets. And referring back to Július Koller’s idea of a “new cultural situation,” there will be exhibition formats that involve neither art transportation and the associated CO2 emissions nor exhibition displays requiring a plethora of materials.
One such attempt at realizing a climate-neutral exhibition will be carried out during the autumn of 2024 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. There, Pierre Bal-Blanc will stage a “suitcase exhibition” with a very special selection of works held by Kontakt that will enter into dialogue with the French federal collection CNAP. The latter, likewise celebrating 20 years of existence, offers manifold synergies for reciprocal contextualization. For this project, no materialized artworks will travel to Paris—only concepts, ideas, and performance instructions documented on paper as well as in filmic and photographic form. These documents will be packed into a suitcase and brought by the participating artists to Paris, where they will be accordingly presented and reenacted. In a continuation of this Parisian experiment, the new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by the American architect Thomas Phifer will be inaugurated by the initiation of a long-term institutional collaboration with Kontakt in the form of a joint exhibition project that will see art from Eastern Europe exhibited and discussed over several months. Workshops with international museum experts and theoreticians will accompany the exhibitions in Paris and Warsaw and feature a special emphasis on developing new ways of “exhibiting” Eastern European art.
Moreover, there will be an immaterial exhibition featuring works by artists from Eastern Europe in daily newspapers and magazines. Harking back to the artistic practice of Petr Štembera and Karel Miler, whose works were published in international magazines such as “Flash Art” in the 1970s and thus aimed at an audience that would not have seen these works in Czechoslovakia, young artists from Eastern Europe will be invited to use such media formats to create exhibition spaces of their own. There will also be a jubilee professorship associated with the collection and based at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna: through this academic and educational experiment, students will embark on alternative paths in order to explore the Eastern European neo-avant-garde in a process that will entail their active engagement in society.
Kontakt’s 20th anniversary will hence feature the attempt to analyze questions inherent in the artistic works that it holds while demonstrating both how issues and concerns raised since the 1960s are still of relevance today and how the need to resolve certain types of crises has persisted over the decades—with a constant eye to an imaginary future that continues to influence our immediate present.
January 2024
Kontakt’s focus is on art that is highly specific and unique. European culture at large, however, will remain deprived of these riches until it finds ways of broadening the scope of its perception and dialogue to integrate the inputs of these artists, who have been contributing significant works to the history of European art since the late 1950s. Several among these works address models of the future and the possibility of enriching present reality through imaginary modes of thought, thereby embodying a quest for alternative views of reality—or, in the words of Slovak artist Július Koller, for a new “cultural situation.” With its name, Kontakt pays tribute to the work of Július Koller—who created “KONTAKT (Anti-Happening)” (1969) as well as multiple similarly titled work series from the late 1960s onwards. Koller also, in one of his manifestos, called for a “cosmo-humanist” situation as a mode of existence that, viewed in light of our crisis-ridden contemporary world order, is indeed still quite relevant today.
Kontakt’s 20th anniversary serves to raise questions about possible future scenarios posed from artistic as well as institutional perspectives. The latter relate to climate justice tendencies and resource scarcity, whose effects also impact current practices in terms of conceiving and realizing exhibitions. Attention is hence being paid to dematerialized art, which makes up a large share of the Kontakt’s holdings and encompasses mail art, performances, happenings, visual and experimental poetry, and sound-based works from the 1960s and 1970s. These ephemeral manifestations in time were captured on paper, film, and photographs. Many of these artistic ideas were never realized, thus remaining mental experiments. With their dematerialized art, Július Koller and his fellow artists created a flexible and operative artistic tool for the initiation of critical discourse within communist countries in order to establish contact (Kontakt) with other colleagues in and outside the region, suggesting an alternative future for a universal community.
Current geopolitical events and constant war trigger feelings similar to the powerlessness and passivity felt in the wake of the Prague Spring movement’s collapse, evoking calls for alternatives in an immediate future. The realm of art is one of those areas where frustration with democracy and subjective institutional failure vis-à-vis climate change have manifested themselves. The urgency of setting limits in this context, as well, stems from how numerous art institutions have contributed to CO2 emissions and global warming over the years. Kontakt will attempt to reflect upon this situation to which it, too, has contributed—which raises the question as to what significant changes are necessary and possible in order to place art institutions’ work on a sustainable footing.
For its 20th anniversary, Kontakt will attempt to focus on those utopian moments and ideas that are inscribed upon the dematerialized art projects of the 1960s and ’70s by way of exhibitions, films, workshops, and projects in specific media outlets. And referring back to Július Koller’s idea of a “new cultural situation,” there will be exhibition formats that involve neither art transportation and the associated CO2 emissions nor exhibition displays requiring a plethora of materials.
One such attempt at realizing a climate-neutral exhibition will be carried out during the autumn of 2024 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. There, Pierre Bal-Blanc will stage a “suitcase exhibition” with a very special selection of works held by Kontakt that will enter into dialogue with the French federal collection CNAP. The latter, likewise celebrating 20 years of existence, offers manifold synergies for reciprocal contextualization. For this project, no materialized artworks will travel to Paris—only concepts, ideas, and performance instructions documented on paper as well as in filmic and photographic form. These documents will be packed into a suitcase and brought by the participating artists to Paris, where they will be accordingly presented and reenacted. In a continuation of this Parisian experiment, the new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by the American architect Thomas Phifer will be inaugurated by the initiation of a long-term institutional collaboration with Kontakt in the form of a joint exhibition project that will see art from Eastern Europe exhibited and discussed over several months. Workshops with international museum experts and theoreticians will accompany the exhibitions in Paris and Warsaw and feature a special emphasis on developing new ways of “exhibiting” Eastern European art.
Moreover, there will be an immaterial exhibition featuring works by artists from Eastern Europe in daily newspapers and magazines. Harking back to the artistic practice of Petr Štembera and Karel Miler, whose works were published in international magazines such as “Flash Art” in the 1970s and thus aimed at an audience that would not have seen these works in Czechoslovakia, young artists from Eastern Europe will be invited to use such media formats to create exhibition spaces of their own. There will also be a jubilee professorship associated with the collection and based at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna: through this academic and educational experiment, students will embark on alternative paths in order to explore the Eastern European neo-avant-garde in a process that will entail their active engagement in society.
Kontakt’s 20th anniversary will hence feature the attempt to analyze questions inherent in the artistic works that it holds while demonstrating both how issues and concerns raised since the 1960s are still of relevance today and how the need to resolve certain types of crises has persisted over the decades—with a constant eye to an imaginary future that continues to influence our immediate present.
January 2024