Video: Bastian Hartig.
This event entailed conversation between artist Mischa Kuball and curator Norman Kleeblatt about art, memory, and the museum.
Mischa Kuball: making of Mnemosyne (after Aby Warburg), 2021
Two of Mischa Kuball’s works on display at 1014 were the product of in-depth research into the work of the cultural scholar Aby Warburg, who developed his picture atlas Mnemosyne in the 1920s. It arranged photographic reproductions of works of art on 63 panels alongside contemporary clippings from newspapers and advertisements in a collage-like manner. The composition of the images aimed to trace gestures and patterns that tended to be similar, ranging from antiquity to the Renaissance to the present day. Through this composition, Warburg wanted to visualize the interweaving of epochs in the manner of a cross-temporal pictorial memory. Retrospectively, his rearrangement of canonized works and their consideration across epochs appear as a visionary anticipation of today's image and media studies.
res·o·nant, the third work on display, is a reference to the walk-through light and sound installation, which was exhibited at the Jewish Museum Berlin exhibited in 2017. Kuball created the installation specially for the new exhibition space on the lower ground floor of the Daniel Libeskind building.
Co-hosted in partnership with the Leo Baeck Institute and the University Alliance Ruhr: North American offices of the Ruhr University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, and the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Norman Kleeblatt has over thirty-five years of museum experience and was formerly the Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator at the Jewish Museum, New York. Known for mounting innovative exhibitions, he is interested as well in the wider history, politics, and aesthetics of the art exhibit. His articles have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Art Journal, and Art News. Among the exhibitions he organized are: Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning and American Art at the Jewish Museum and Six Feet Under: Make Nice (2004: Rainer Ganahl, Artur Zmijewski) at White Box in NYC.
Mischa Kuball has been working in the public and institutional sphere since 1977. He uses light as a medium to explore architectural spaces as well as social and political discourses and reflects on a whole variety of aspects from sociocultural structures to architectural interventions as well as emphasizing or reinterpreting their monumental nature and context in architectural history. Public and private space merge into an indistinguishable whole in politically motivated participation projects, providing a platform for communication between the audience, the artist, the work itself and public space.