Skip to main content

Kontakt mumok (2006)

Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
Courtesy: museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, photo: Lisa Rastl
/10
Kontakt … works from the Collection of Erste Bank Group
17 March–21 May 2006
mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

Curators: Silvia Eiblmayr, Georg Schöllhammer, Walter Seidl, Jiří Ševčík, Branka Stipančić

The first presentation of the Kontakt Collection took place in 2006 at Vienna’s Museum of Modern Art/Foundation Ludwig (mumok) and at the tranzit Workshops in Bratislava. The exhibition showed an overview of art from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe created since the 1960s. Performance art, media reflexivity, and responses to modernist art practices made up the central focus of this presentation, which also marked the beginning of the banking group’s collecting activities. Furthermore, this project was the first presentation of art from the countries of Central Europe to be mounted as a border-crossing show in two locations.
The works shown in this exhibition reflected the political and historical transformations that had taken place in Europe since the 1960s, as well as the importance of art before the backdrop of current cultural, social, and economic developments. Erste Bank Group presented a chapter in the international history of art that had been neglected up to then and attempted to make a contribution to its reevaluation in the current art discourse. While the exhibition’s earlier works (from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s) were shown at the mumok, the more recent positions were exhibited at the tranzit Workshops in Bratislava. The latter was founded as an exhibition space for young art, and its choice made clear the crucial intention of Erste Bank Group to provide infrastructural support and create platforms of artistic production in the countries where the Group does business. The goal of collection policy is to present the works of less-known artists to a broader international public, and in so doing explore Europe’s changed and still-changing geographies. The art of the formerly Communist countries is to be regarded in a general international art-historical context so as to bring out mutual relationships as well as differing practices. These aspects were also outlined in the exhibition. The presentation offered the opportunity to trace parallel as well as highly individual artistic practices in the context of transforming political, economic, and social structures.

mumok
Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
Museumsplatz 1| A–1070 Vienna