“Primary Structures” revisits the landmark 1966 exhibition of the same name at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Sixty years later, the exhibition asks how art is produced, documented, and presented, bringing together positions that rethink authorship, artistic practice, and institutional visibility by Focusing on the structural conditions of the art field.
As a productive misunderstanding of the original exhibition, “Primary Structures” focuses on the shared foundation of Kaiserwache and oxfordberlin as independent non-profit exhibition spaces. Both operate through experimental forms of exhibition making and provide the infrastructural conditions that many artists depend on. At the same time, both are embedded in architectures of the early twentieth century, a period marked by profound social transformations and the radicalization of nationalist movements.
oxfordberlin is situated as a publicly accessible bulletin board within a UNESCO World Heritage housing estate from the 1920s in Berlin, part of the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates. Kaiserwache, in contrast, occupies a protected public toilet building from the early twentieth century designed in the Art Nouveau style. Both sites appropriate existing infrastructures of public life and enter into a dialogue with them.
The exhibition brings together works by Megan Francis Sullivan, Florence Jung, Sophie Kovel, Julian Irlinger, Niklas Taleb, Fiona Connor, and Hanne Darboven.
Megan Francis Sullivan’s “A Catalogue Raisonné” functions as both an artwork and a means of self-historicization.
Drawing on the legacy of Christopher D’Arcangelo’s practice in the 1970s, Florence Jung’s contribution appears to withdraw from artistic representation through a discrete work, instead transferring control over the narrative of her practice to the exhibition’s two organizers.
With her series “The Kodak is at the Front,” Sophie Kovel references the period in which Kaiserwache was built and the influence of military technologies on artistic production.
Julian Irlinger’s “Laterne, Laterne” recalls traditional children’s lanterns. Marked by the silhouette of Joseph II, the work establishes multiple connections to the architecture of Kaiserwache and the figure after which it is named.
Niklas Taleb’s photograph “Dinosauriergespräche” (Dinosaur Conversations) points to a fundamental form of acquiring language and knowledge. The work depicts an adult seemingly discussing dinosaurs with a child. At the same time, the apparent age difference allows the adult figure to appear almost dinosaur-like as well.
A publication by Fiona Connor, produced in conjunction with her exhibition at Secession Vienna, is included in the exhibition. It documents artistic interventions in a variety of domestic interiors and extends interests also present in her typographic work for oxfordberlin.
Hanne Darboven’s artist’s book “00–99. Ein Jahrhundert I–XII (…)” from 1976 offers yet another way of understanding the title “Primary Structures,” foregrounding her sustained engagement with systems of language and numbers.
– Samuel Bich und Philipp Farra