Curated by Matthew Higgs

• 06.05.–06.06.2009

From May 6 to June 6, 2009, Galerie Martin Janda will be showing works by Karl Holmqvist and Christopher Knowles within the exhibition Correspondences. Curated by Matthew Higgs, Correspondences forms part of curated by_vienna 09 and takes place at the galleries of Eschenbachgasse.

Correspondences is a series of five discrete two-person exhibitions that each takes the form of a crossgenerational “conversation” between artists and artworks. Over the past decade or so, inter-generational approaches to exhibition making have become more widespread. (Catherine David’s influential Documenta X in 1997 was perhaps a defining moment, in which she introduced a series of idiosyncratic historical artistic positions into her exhibition through what she termed retro-perspectives.) Since then both artists and curators have accelerated and amplified this dialogue, seeking to establish and explore a more complex lineage (and progeny) for current artistic production. The five individual exhibitions that comprise Correspondences differ significantly from one another. Variously they consider photography’s self-reflexive and mimetic dimension (Janice Guy and Anne Collier); the impact and legacy of the modernist project on post-war American photography (Jan Groover and Eileen Quinlan); the formal and psychological rupture inherent in collage (Rita Ackermann and John Stezaker); the figure of the artist as performer and the artwork as a form of performative document (Karl Holmqvist and Christopher Knowles); and the everyday poetics of a kind of informal formalism (Noam Rappaport and B. Wurtz).

The ten artists in Correspondences do not represent a tendency or movement. Distinguished by age, experience, and intentions their works have evolved independently and have been produced in highly specific contexts. Each exhibition — each pairing or juxtaposition — privileges points of departure as much as shared concerns. The intention ultimately is not to establish a form of equivalence, rather the hope is that in considering the spaces between each artist and work — differences informed by the individual artist’s origins and intentions — a new conversation might emerge. Correspondences — as the exhibition’s title suggests — is intended as an unfolding and ongoing exchange, one that underscores the persistent flux in which ideas both emerge and evolve.

Text: Matthew Higgs