curated by | Krist Gruijthuijsen |
Director KW Berlin

The Me in Me
With Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Jason Dodge, Barbara Visser, Tamy Ben-Tor, Hanne Lippard, Ben Kinmont

Opening: 8 September 2016, 6:00–9:00 pm in all participating galleries
Duration: 9 September – 15 October 2016

curated by_vienna: Meine Herkunft habe ich mir selbst ausgedacht
20 Exhibitions in Vienna’s Leading Contemporary Art Galleries

In contrast to the times of the avant-gardes, artistic claims of innovation today are premised less on the cutting-off of lines of tradition but rather on the rediscovery and reinvention of precursors. What is it that prompts artists to increasingly turn towards their role models and how are the corresponding homages, references and quotations revealed in their works? Which continuities, and also breaches, become apparent when it comes to creating a guiding figure? Under the title of “Meine Herkunft habe ich mir selbst ausgedacht” [My Origins? I Made Them Up], curated by_vienna explores questions like these in the gallery festival’s eighth year. International curators conceive 20 exhibitions on this theme, finding their multi-faceted expression in the 20 participating galleries. The theoretical basis for curated by_vienna 2016 was created by the author, journalist and cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen with his eponymous essay.
curated by_vienna has been coordinated and financed by the Vienna Business Agency with its creative center departure since 2009 to support systematic cooperation between Viennese contemporary art galleries and international curators.

“In the early 1970s, the Icelandic artist Hreinn Fridfinnsson (b.1943, Iceland) placed an advert in a Dutch art magazine asking people to send him their secrets. By posing as a collector of secrets, the artist would, he thought, allay suspicions that he had any ulterior motive in using or revealing privileged information that might come his way. It is like something from a novel by José Saramago, or an urban myth or rumour. The secret, Fridfinnsson may be telling us, is that there isn’t one. His art, on the other hand, is an invitation to imagine that there might be.
After 40 years, Fridfinnsson concluded his “secrets project”. The accumulated secrets have been destroyed and used as base for a painting. This painting, or rather painterly object, forms the starting point of this venture, which explores, in a material sense, the vulnerable understanding of the self through (de)mystifying ideas of representation; whether it’s through Jason Dodge warming up the content of people’s pockets, Ben Kinmont requesting one single visitor to think about something else then art while blowing into a balloon after which the balloon is left in the gallery, Hanne Lippard’s exploration of the letter “S” in the word “success”, Barbara Visser’s savage image of the relationship between the artist and commerce or Tamy Ben-Tor’s portrayal on the banality of artistic jargon.”