(22.04. –10.09.2023)
The disintegration of the liberal-capitalist post-war order which seemed firmly established after 1989 also left its mark on the art of this society. This is precisely where Illiberal Lives, the current exhibition at the Ludwig Forum Aachen, inserts itself. It probes how, with the dissolution of the liberal promise of progress, the unfree, illiberal core of modern freedoms inevitably surfaces, and the liberal fiction of art as a space of expression for bourgeois freedom also comes under increasing pressure. Where art is not just defending these properties, or making itself subservient to the invocation of national communities, it is increasingly crystallising at present as a practical scene of social conflicts and exclusions. The works by Pauline Curnier Jardin, Johanna Hedva, Ho Rui An, Blaise Kirschner, Jota Mombaça, Henrike Naumann, Melika Ngombe Kolongo, Bassem Saad, Mikołaj Sobczak, and Jordan Strafer break with the constraints and violence of liberal freedoms and let artistic forms of an illiberal life take their place. The rehangings of the works from the collections at the Ludwig Forum Aachen selected by the artists, which make up part of Illiberal Lives, add seminal intensifications of the relations pasts and presents enter into the exhibition. In their engagement with works by, for instance, Renato Guttuso, Konrad Klapheck, and Jeff Koons, works like those by Vincent Desiderio and Magdalena Jetelová that are shown more rarely also come into view. The invited artists are always also re-situating the post-fascist history of an institution whose collections are intractably associated with the rhetoric of the bloc confrontation between East and West in the post-war period, and the liberal narrative of “free” and “unfree” art.
No registration required
Cost: € 2.00 plus admission
Meeting point: Museum entrance
