A different kind of museum experience: US artists Steffani Jemison and Justin Hicks take a performance-based look at the Neue Galerie collection.

There’s buzzing, humming, singing, screaming and whispering at the Neue Galerie. On the walls, landscape paintings from Waldmüller to Thöny. Images of an age long gone that reveal much more than merely the masterful portrayal of landscapes. They manifest different attitudes towards the world. And in between, an unexpected procession of people making music, singing and talking.

In her exhibitions and performances, US artist Steffani Jemison considers how literacy and language are inflected by the legacies of slavery and colonialism. For steirischer herbst 2016 she joins forces with composer Justin Hicks to focus a critical eye on the current exhibition at Neue Galerie. By means of a wide range of different musical languages and quotations – from Béla Bartok to Louis Armstrong – they turn any space into a microcosm. But for Jemison and Hicks, a number of central questions lie concealed behind this apparent lightness: How does a museum organise its visitors, its objects and information? What do landscape and nature have to do with learning and knowledge? What do names have to do with nations? Reading with singing? Landscape with rhythm and blues? And to what extent are hierarchies of gender or hegemonic concepts of Europe in relation to the “other” ingrained in the pictorial worlds on view?

In their performances Steffani Jemison and Justin Hicks break with the conventions of the white cube, intervening in and questioning museum contexts with the aid of texts and music; most recently at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2015. At the invitation of steirischer herbst, they are bringing their first performance to Europe. After the premiere, their performance tour will be available as an audio guide.

Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Steffani Jemison
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Justin Hicks

Mediathek