Modernology. 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 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. More than eighty 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.

Artists’ statements generated by André Rottmann and texts by various authors, including Inke Arns, Silke Baumann, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, Barbara Clausen, Helmut Draxler, Jordi Font Agulló, Karin Gludovatz, Teresa Grandas, Patricia Grzonka, Matthias Michalka, Juliane Rebentisch, Anne Rorimer, Gertrud Sandqvist, Kerstin Stakemeier.