The title of the exhibition ‘Soleil politique’ (Political Sun) is taken from a work by Marcel Broodthaers, made in 1972 using an illustration cropped from an encyclopedia, in which the artist has altered the illustration depicting the relative size of the planets in the Solar System. In adding the word ‘politique’ to the largest sphere depicting the Sun, Broodthaers praises the Sun’s emancipatory force and, at the same time, reveals the hegemonic character of a power that demands obedience. In completing the work by altering the smallest circle, depicting the Earth, he places his discourse in space and affirms a consciousness of its finitude. In merging planet Earth with the darkness of the universe, as rendered by the page’s black background, the former director of the Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles) brings to light the risk of a return to obscurantism. With the stroke of a pen, Broodthaers eclipses the entire planet with ink, and thus points to the somber threat that an identity oblivious to its incompleteness and insufficiency poses.

The exhibition ‘Soleil politique’ is presented at the Bolzano Museion (Italy), the name of which takes us back to the origins of the museum as it was founded in 391 BC by the Ptolemy Dynasty. During the French Revolution, the term ‘Museion,’ from the Latin ‘museum,’ referred to the sanctuary that housed the riches of collective memory previously in the possession of the monarchy or the clergy and subsequently handed over to the people. At the time, it was still inhabited, as indeed it was in Ancient Egypt. Ancient or revolutionary, it is the refuge for a community of artists and trans-disciplinary scholars in constant dialogue with their students and temporary guests.

We return here to this polymorphous and living model shared by philosophers, from both the ancient world and the Enlightenment, in order to build the Museum of the twenty-first century. The industrial age and its taxonomy gave body to the modern art museum in the twentieth century. Yet its dogmatism, such as that of the encyclopedia, the outmoded form of which Marcel Broodthaers relied upon to make his work, will end up decalcifying the skeletal structure of an edifice otherwise subjected to economic profit, divisions of labor and the compartmentalization of specialized areas of competence. Recent attempts to reinvigorate the museum institution with internal changes (by introducing museum educators and docents or de-compartmentalizing disciplines) or external trends (opening the museum to new geographies and populations) should not hide the causes of such reforms. Endogenesis or exogenisis are not sufficient to stop an organism from reviving the same dangerous traditions in which it continues to prospect for deposits of authenticity as a potential source of profit, as its architecture and segmentary programs reveal.

Is the museum the site that consecrates capitalist homogeneity or the site of a ‘heterogenetic’ process?

In the age of urban and digital revolution, the domestic market colonizes the globe and mental space. The exhibition ‘Soleil politique’ infiltrates the vast, multitudinous systems to which we belong. It relies on the stories and scripts of artists or authors and borrows their distinct creative and operational methods in order to thwart the organized insecurity which pervades society through the dominant system of commodity exchange. Existing or specially commissioned works produced in the heart of the borderland Alto Adige Valley introduce spatial perspectives that, in all ways, exceed distinct regions. They establish temporal rhythms that stimulate an intentionally involuntary memory. The exhibition ‘Soleil politique’ replaces this year’s trends and media events with an program of moods and feelings.

Works by: Mathieu Abonnenc, Raimund Abraham, , Robert Breer, KP Brehmer, Marcel Broodthaers, CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux – Philippe Thomas, Achille Castiglioni, Marie Cool e Fabio Balducci, Josef Dabernig, Giorgio De Chirico, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Alberto Garutti, Isa Genzken, Prinz Gholam, Dan Graham, Mauricio Guillén, Sanja Ivekovic, Marcello Maloberti, Mattin, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Marta Minujín, Deimantas Narkevicius, Roman Ondák, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Emilie Parendeau, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gianni Pettena, Walter Pichler, Pratchaya Phinthong, Emilio Prini, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, R&Sie(n) François Roche, Stephanie Lavaux, Jean Navarro, Matthieu Saladin, Carlo Scarpa, Allan Sekula, Santiago Sierra, Elaine Sturtevant, Terre Thaemlitz, Slaven Tolj, Annie Vigier et Franck Apertet, Marie Voignier, Lois Weinberger et al.

A tri-lingual catalogue (DE-EN-IT) will be published on occasion of the show.

Pierre Bal-Blanc is an independent curator and is the Director of CAC Brétigny (Contemporary Art Center of Bretigny, Greater Paris) in France, where he runs since 2003, Phalanstère Project, a site-specific artist works series (Atelier van Lieshout, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Roman Ondak, Teresa Margolles, among others) parallel to the exhibitions and residencies program of the art center (Artur Zmijewski, Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet, Clemens von Wedemeyer and Maya Schweizer, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, Pratchaya Phinthong, Ei Arakawa, Terre Thaemlitz, among others). In his sequence of international exhibitions La Monnaie vivante-Living Currency (Stuk Leuven, Tate Modern London, Moma Warsaw, Berlin Biennale) or Draft Score for an Exhibition (Le Plateau Paris, Artissima Torino, Secession Vienna, Index Stockholm), he negotiated the current and historical analysis of the body and strategies related to performance in visual arts. He commissioned the exhibition in 3 chapters Reversibility at the Frieze Art Fair in 2008, CAC Brétigny in 2010 and at Peep Hole in Milan in 2012 (Catalogue Reversibility, Ed. Mousse Publishing 2013), The Death of the Audience at Secession in Vienna in 2010(Catalogue Ver Sacrum/The Death of the Audience, Ed. Secession 2011). He co-curated the exhibitions series “Cornelius Cardew and the Freedom of Listening” (CAC Brétigny, Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2009; Culturgest Porto, 2010) and “Anarchism without Adjectives: On the work of Christopher D’Arcangelo, 1975-1979” (CAC Brétigny, Artists Space New York, 2011, Extracity Antwerpen 2012, Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, Université Concordia, Montréal (Québec)2013).

Opening: 26/09/2014, 7pm

Museion

Via Dante, 6
Bozen 39100 Italy
Tel. + 39 047 1223413
info@museion.it
www.museion.it

Opening hours

Tuesday - Sunday from 10am to 6pm
Thursday from 10am to 10pm

Related images
  1. Lili Reynaud-Dewar, karma international 1
  2. Prozession mit Tragbarem Schrein, 1970, (Walter Pichler and Werner Stupka), Foto: Marina Faust
  3. Lili Reynaud-Dewar, I am intact and I don't care (Consortium, exposition Phillip King) 2013
  4. Emilio Prini, Stampa di un consumo - Monaco '71 Il caffè del Kunstverein, 1971, Courtesy Galleria Piomonti Roma
  5. Allan Sekula, Meat Mass, 1972, Foto by Allan Sekula and David Alward, (c) Generali Foundation
  6. Marta Minujín, El obelisco acostado, 1978