With the 2024 theme Between Past and Future, Kestner Gesellschaft concludes a trilogy of its self-reflection which began with the 2022 investigation of the notion of tenderness and was continued in 2023 by a series of exhibitions.
Kestner Gesellschaft continues its journey of self-reflection with the group exhibition The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor El Lissitzky: Self-Portrait as the Kestner Gesellschaft.
The history of avant-garde museology begins after the October Revolution, when the Russian champions of new art proposed the establishment of a network of Museums of Artistic Culture. Not much later, a group of New-York-based modernists and Dadaists started the Société Anonyme, a collective that sought to establish the first American museum of modern art. The successive chapters of this story were written by the Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky, who designed the Kabinett der Abstrakten at the Hanover Provinzialmuseum, and by the avant-garde a.r. group, whose efforts began the International Collection of Modern Art at the Łódź museum now known as the Muzeum Sztuki.
As their new exhibition Useless Bodies? opens Fondazione Prada, the artistic duo behind the infamous Prada Marfa installation talk to Hans Ulrich Obrist about the future of the body, art and experientialism