Exhibition

Exhibition

Visitors in the exhibition MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI
image: Gregor Gleiwitz; untitled; April 2012 | photo: Raimund Zakowski 

MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI
May 17 - August 19, 2012

What issues concern international contemporary artists working in Germany? What vocabularies of form do they use in their work? What themes are important? The Sprengel Museum Hannover, the kestnergesellschaft, and the Kunstverein Hannover address these questions in an extensive survey, MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI.

The exhibition is the successor of the popular 2007 show “Made in Germany,” the three art centers’ first collaborative exhibition. The exhibition presented the work of 45 young artists of international backgrounds currently living and working in Germany. MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI focused on six main themes designed to highlight current artistic concerns. The curators of the exhibition placed the artistic involvement with (social, virtual, institutional) “Spaces,” “Narrativity,” “Networkings,” with “The past in the present,” with the “Super-sensory,” and with the limitations and stretching of the medium (“Medium as material”) at the center of their inquiry into the current state of artistic creativity in Germany as possible approaches to the exhibition. Many of the works in the show were created specifically for MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI to exemplify contemporary art and forms of expression.

In “Made in Germany” in 2007 the three institutions introduced fifty-two artistic positions. By contrast to the globally oriented Documenta in Kassel, which took place at the same time, the presentation concentrated on the art scene in Germany. “Made in Germany” was a sweeping success and conveyed an impression of the active, high-quality and varied art scene in the country. It included several artists who were discovered internationally as a result of the exhibition, which had over 60,000 visitors and around 400 reviews.

The curators of MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI were Susanne Figner, Martin Germann, Antonia Lotz, Kathrin Meyer, Carina Plath, Gabriele Sand, Kristin Schrader, Ute Stuffer and René Zechlin. The exhibition’s organisers were the directors Ulrich Krempel (Sprengel Museum Hannover), Veit Görner (kestnergesellschaft) and René Zechlin (Kunstverein Hannover).

The exhibition was under the patronage of Federal President Joachim Gauck.