23.09. 2022 – 08.01. 2023
It is one of the most burning questions of our time: How can we still tell what is real and what is fake? Ultimately, the future of the idea of a liberal democratic constitutional state depends on this question. On our ability to distinguish truth from fake.
The large-scale cooperative exhibition project curated by Katrin Bucher Trantow and Sabine Kienzer, which the Kunsthaus Graz is carrying out together with Creative Industries Styria, the Graz Museum, KULTUM and the FH-Joanneum for this year’s steirischer herbst festival, explores this question from a wide variety of perspectives.
The exhibition at the Kunsthaus Graz follows the development of the interfaces between graphic design, media image and art since 1971 along the explosive term “fake”. With works e.g. from Rosemarie Trockel, Gerwald Rockenschaub to Signe Pierce, she reflects both political upheavals and technological developments. Faking the Real is dedicated to the question of the manipulation of realities and shows a development from posters in public space to interventions in social media. The exhibition is part of the large special show The Art of Seduction, which reflects 100 years of graphic design and poster art from different perspectives.
Especially in the last few decades, both graphic designers and artists have used concepts and ideas of selling, manipulating and celebrating in parallel. In doing so, they are increasingly influenced by one another – not only in an appropriating manner, but also in a self-confident, affirmative manner. In addition to material innovations, it is particularly technological innovations that not only drive advertising graphics themselves, but also art in its mirror.
Digital layout programs create almost endless possibilities for surface designs. Coming from collage, the first image processing programs inspired pioneering positions in art such as John Baldessari to create smooth image montages and, from the 1980s onwards, inspired a first generation of digital artists such as Peter Kogler to create ever larger, spatially expanding graphics.
Current positions in art such as Christiane Peschek or Hito Steyerl, who is represented with a solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus, not only allow the analogue and digital worlds to merge interactively, but also to merge invisibly. The question of the “applied” as something covertly seductive, remote and calculated and manipulative by an invisible hand is posed here again in a completely new way.
Kunst der Verführung: Faking the Real
23.09. 2022 – 08.01. 2023
Kunsthaus Graz
www.museum-joanneum.at
