When Forms Become Attitude

Curated by Kiki Seiler-Michalitsi

The title of the exhibition refers in a modified form to the exhibition title Live in your head: When Attitudes Become Form, under which the groundbreaking exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 took place. Harald Szeemann's much-discussed show was not only directed against the dominance of informal painting (Tachism) and geometric art at the time. Rather, it was a new form of work presentation and the staging of new art forms and materials, which were also intended to lead to an expansion of the concept of art. With Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information – the detailed title in the exhibition catalog in Bern – the "forms" were also named in which artistic attitudes became "work", "form". More than four and a half decades later, the first attempts at a "reenactment" of the actionistically charged exhibition at the Berner Kunsthalle were undertaken (2013, Fondazione Prada, Venice), and reflecting on this, the dormant question of the significance of artistic attitude and its visibility in "form" in times of globalized, networked culture is once again coming to the fore. The exhibition at Kunst Raum Riehen, with works by five artists working in different fields, attempts to explore this question.