Author: Studio Christian Jankowski

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Family Constellation (2020) I 26.05.23 – 17.09.23

Wir alle sind in Familien aufgewachsen und auch wenn wir diese als Heranwachsende verlassen, bleiben wir meistens weiterhin mit unserer Ursprungsfamilie in Kontakt. Was wir in unserer ›Familie‹ erleben, ob wir Einzelkinder sind oder Geschwister haben, hat Auswirkungen auf unser gesamtes Leben. Überraschenderweise jedoch wurde die längste und nicht selten intensivste Beziehung im Leben eines Menschen – die Geschwisterbeziehung – bislang in den Wissenschaften kaum erforscht und noch nie zum Thema einer Ausstellung gemacht. Mit SISTERS & BROTHERS. 500 JAHRE GESCHWISTER IN DER KUNST dokumentiert die Kunsthalle Tübingen das facettenreiche Thema der Geschwisterbeziehung in der bildenden Kunst erstmals umfassend mit rund 100 Werken.

Aus kulturhistorischer Perspektive machen die gezeigten Gemälde, Skulpturen, Objekte und Videos die Veränderung der Geschwisterdarstellungen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart anhand eines chronologischen Parcours anschaulich. Dieser führt vom schönen Schein der Genremalerei über das romantische und bürgerliche Geschwisterbild bis zu Darstellungen der Gegenwart. Gerade die zeitgenössischen Künstlerinnen und Künstler brechen die historischen Geschwisterdarstellungen in ihren Werken heute nicht nur ironisch, sondern unternehmen darüber hinaus eigene »Tiefenbohrungen«, die auch die herausfordernden Seiten in den Beziehungen von Geschwistern ausleuchten. Nicht zuletzt zeigen sie, dass das Thema auch Zukunftspotential birgt.

Ob Zwillinge, Geschwister, Stiefgeschwister oder Geschwister im Geiste, wer mit anderen aufwächst, ist konfliktfähig und übt sich meist früh in Fürsorge und Solidarität – kurz der oder die erwirbt sich wichtige Schlüsselqualifikationen für ein menschliches Miteinander.

Begleitend zur Ausstellung entsteht ein umfangreicher interdisziplinärer Katalog mit Beiträgen von Tilman Allert, Nicole Fritz, Tilo Grabach, Zita Hartel, Bernd M. Meyer, Sabine Wienker-Piepho. Die Publikation leistet einen wichtigen Auftakt für eine längst überfällige, fundierte Analyse von Geschwistern in unserer Gesellschaft.

Die Ausstellung wird anschließend vom Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Österreich übernommen.

Konzept und Kuration: Dr. Nicole Fritz

Kuratorische Assistenz: Zita Hartel und Lisa Maria Maier

Eine Ausstellung der Kunsthalle Tübingen in Kooperation mit Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz

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Christian Jankowski will be part in the 4th Industrial Art Biennale 2023 / May 14th – June 30, 2023

The Industrial Art Biennial (IAB) is an international exhibition of contemporary art. The project was initiated in 2016 by the activist collective Labin Art Express. The Biennial is conceived as an experimental laboratory. Its starting point passes from the industrial topography of Istria, and reflects the phenomenas which shaped the social and cultural landscape of the region. The 4th IAB will focus on the specific context of the three cities: Pula, Raša and Labin, with a satellite in Rijeka. The Industrial Revolution was not only followed by profound economic and social changes. It also led to a radical change in our understanding of art: Modernism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Impressionism are artistic reactions to the mechanisation of the world. New modes of expression were needed to understand the radical transformation of society. The 4th IAB reflects how the Istrian Peninsula, Raša, was particularly including the cities of Rijeka, Pula, Labin, and influenced in many ways by these processes and was home to an impressive number of pioneering personalities and initiatives – attempting to turn utopian ideas into reality. Even today, many testimonies of visionary projects are visible and tangible in Istria.

The civilizing achievement of the Pax Augusta (from 27 BC) manifests itself in the almost completely preserved Temple of Augustus in Pula, which is also described by Andrea Palladio in his architectural textbooks (“I quattro libri dell architectura”) as an ideal, perfect building. The mining town of Raša, designed by the Jewish architect Gustavo Pulitzer-Finali on behalf of the Italian fascists, is a unique urbanistic ensemble from the period of Italian rationalism. In the neighboring mining town of Labin, also rich in industrial-historical buildings, the Republic of Labin was proclaimed from March 2 to April 8, 1921 – a republic self-governed by miners and peasants during a strike, a participative project avant-la-lettre. The occupation of Rijeka by the Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio heralded a turbulent period of diverse political and nationalist visions after World War I, which manifested itself in a wild succession of government models in the Free City of Fiume. With the leading feminist and reform pedagogue Giuseppina Martinuzzi

(1844-1925) and the space explorer Herman Potočnik Noordung (1892-1929), Istria has produced two other personalities whose visionary viewpoints and researches still impress today. The 4th IAB focuses on the exploration of those “Landscapes of Desire”, in Istria and beyond. With this narrative in mind, artists with different backgrounds will be invited to develop on-site interventions, to undertake intensive field studies, and to research on specific utopian sources in a beautiful and rich territory. The exhibition-project is an innovative tribute to the utopian energy of the Istrian peninsula, with a focus on today’s social, cultural, and economical challenges.

The 4th IAB is a discursive field of artistic experiences, and spans a colourful rainbow over the landscape of utopias. Pula based writer Tatjana Gromača, who was a sparring-partner for the curators, states, that people have to look for new and utopian landscapes, because this longing is something that helps to survive: “I have a very nice feeling with the word ‘landscape‘, and I see how beautiful and different perspectives appear in our imagination.”

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Heavy Weight History (2013) I screening, July 5th to September 24th, 2023

Since the 1990s, when the development of contemporary art began to be considered from multiple perspectives in different parts of the world, we have been seeing that contemporary art today goes far beyond the framework of arts and crafts and fine art in the school classroom. It is a composite field with connections to all subjects, including language and literature, mathematics, science, and social studies. In each of these disciplines, researchers are exploring the “unknowns” of the world, delving into history, and making new discoveries and inventions from the past to the future in order to enrich our perception of the world. The stance adopted by contemporary artists that seeks to go beyond our preconceptions in a creative way is also connected to this exploration of these unknowns. In this sense, the contemporary art museum is something akin to a “classroom of the world” where we can encounter and learn about these unknown worlds.
WORLD CLASSROOM: Contemporary Art through School Subjects, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Mori Art Museum, is an attempt for us to encounter a world we have never seen or known from a wide variety of perspectives, using the subjects we learn at school as a gateway to contemporary art. Even though this exhibition is divided into such sections as “Language and Literature,” “Social Studies,” “Philosophy,” “Mathematics,” “Science,” “Music,” “Phys. Ed.,” and “Transdisciplinary,” each work, in fact, crosses over multiple subjects and domains. While over half the exhibited works will be drawn from the Mori Art Museum Collection for the first time ever, there will also be newly-commissioned artworks for this exhibition – altogether creating a “classroom of the world,” place of learning with works by some 50 artists/artist groups.

Heavy Weight History will be screened from July 5th to September 24th, 2023.

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Heavy Weigth History (2013), Kunstturnen (Artistic Gymnastics) (2014) I March 24 – July 23 2023

flop focuses on the complex dynamics of experimenting with the limits of a given set of rules. In 1968, Dick Fosbury introduced the first-ever backward jump in the Mexican Olympic high jump. Now, we call it the ‘Fosbury Flop’, after his name. Fosbury revolutionized the record with that little flip of the body, and since then, it’s hard to find anyone who jumps as far as he did in the high jump, changing the way the game is played.
Of course, not every revolution was successful. Like ‘Underwater’ in freestyle swimming, ‘Somersault’ in the long jump, ‘Spanish style’ in javelin throws, and ‘Korbut flip‘ in parallel bars. Those are the one that challenged the limitation given in sports rules, but were barred based on various reasons. There’s a structure of rules when it comes to sports, within the system of sports, and sometimes external contexts that have nothing to do with sports at all.
Nevertheless, the practice of pushing the limits of the rules or finding holes in the rules continues. We think of sportsmanship as accepting the given
rules, but in fact, there is a complex dynamic inside the system of sports that pursues to break the limitation.
The first problem that we find in exploring these issues is that if you want to change the rules of a world, you have to accept the rules of the game, and you have to be a player within it to open up the possibility of reversing the rules. The most important goal of this project is to extend the dialectical structure
of these rules and fouls from sports to arts and society. The paradoxical struggle to be willing to participate in a given game while rejecting it at the same time bears a resemblance to how art works. In particular, like avant-garde practices that questioned the boundaries of art itself, or post-medium practices that reflexively overturned the limitations of the medium that was already given.
We can find this similarity in how the world works with its own rule. Where you can think of a lot of practices that we are not just accepting it, but trying to change the given structure. We could ask, are the dialectics of rules and fouls are the principles which can change the world? From this perspective, the exhibition is not aimed to fuse sports and arts; it attempts to appropriate sports as a phraseology of art, traversing the rules of the world in strange ways through artistic work. In this way, flop explores the context of the Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, starting with the rules of sports, then exploring various methodologies of arts, to the changing the structure of the world.
In this context, the artistic practice of creating a completely different political movement by appropriating the rules of sports, or the works that reveal the rules of the queer overlapping the norms of normality, is important. Through this project, we plan to conduct research with various artists, create an exhibition, produce texts derived from the project through exhibition-linked research, and archives of techniques prohibited in the history of Olympics. In addition, lectures, workshops, and performance programs will be held. It is as trivial as the small transition that turns your body upside down, but we hope you can open up a moment when you can re-sensitize the small and subtle practices that turn the world upside down.

Installation view: Yokohama Triennial, Yokohama, 2017