Museum der Moderne Salzburg – författare

Controversial, provocative, and at the same time poignantly humorous. Andrea Fraser *1965 in Billings, Montana) is one of the most influential and pioneering artists of her generation and has been captivating her audience for more than thirty years. She employs a wide range of media, including prints, photographs, installations, and performances as well as texts and videos, time and again reformulating the same question: what we all want from art—the motivation behind Fraser’s artistic production, how we view it, and how the art market distributes it.The richly illustrated catalogue allows tracing the artist for the first time from the beginning of her career. It assembles the early Four Posters (1984) as well as her famous performances, such as Museum Highlights (1989), Inaugural Speech (1997), and Official Welcome (2001/03), linking them with her most recent videos.Exhibition: Museum der Moderne Salzburg, 21.3.–5.7.2015

Art-Histories sets out to broaden our understanding of history by looking at it through artefacts and their histories and works of art and the histories they tell. It takes a broad perspective, looking at art that reflects on history and contemporary events as well as its own involvement. The works examined span the period from the sixteenth century to the present.How is history written? Whose mission is it to write it? Which tools are used to examine and evaluate historical events and to disseminate knowledge about them? How objective is current scholarly research, and the historic documents on which it is based? A painting by Jörg Immendorff and Felix Droese from 1974 is entitled "New War – New Art". Indeed, the recent troubles in crisis regions have inspired and generated a new wave of contemporary art with innovative ways of portraying history. Art / Histories presents art and artists engaged with history in a broad historical framework, including those looking back and those depicting the harsh realities of the present.

Wiebke Siem (1954 Kiel, DE – Berlin, DE) became known in the 1990s for extensive installations in which she alienated everyday objects, such as pieces of clothing, shoes, bags, or toys, or transformed them into oversized objects.Wiebke Siems uses pieces of furniture, objects, and materials with domestic connotations and whimsical, often puppet-like figures to create psychologically charged installations that are as oppressive as they are humorous and that raise questions about societal role models. Siem’s art repeatedly employs a formal language and a mode of presentation that refer to ethnological objects and collections. This enables her to comment on Modernism’s problematic appropriation strategies toward non-European art. In addition to borrowing motifs from art and cultural history, Siem critically engages the mechanisms of the male-dominated art business – a central theme in her oeuvre.