20 years of the Verbund Collection

The renowned VERBUND COLLECTION is celebrating its 20th anniversary with an anniversary exhibition at the ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna. On an exhibition space of around 1,000 square meters, around 250 exhibits from the collection's focal points "Feminist Avant-Garde" and "Perception of Spaces & Places" as well as the new acquisitions in the context of "Gender, Identity & Diversity" will be presented.

The corporate collection was founded in 2004 by the Austrian energy company VERBUND and comprises around 1,000 works by 200 artists. The collection's 15 publications have been instrumental in promoting the careers of some of the artists. The exhibition presents numerous new acquisitions, which are being shown in Austria for the first time. The exhibition starts with those artists whose works were collected monographically in depth in accordance with the maxim 'depth instead of breadth', such as Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Birgit Jürgenssen and Renate Bertlmann. Cindy Sherman is accompanied by contemporaries such as Martha Wilson and more recent positions such as Aneta Grzeszykowska, who recreated Sherman's famous Untitled Film Stills in color. This is followed by works from the feminist avant-garde of the 1970s. For the first time in the history of art, these pioneers succeeded in creating a completely new 'image of the woman'. The female body freed itself from its centuries-old object status and emerged as a subject, as an actor. Founding director Gabriele Schor coined the term 'feminist avant-garde' in 2007 to honor the pioneering work of these artists and successfully positioned them in the art historical canon with a ten-year European exhibition tour. By deepening the content of the exhibition, Schor succeeded in establishing a unique selling point for the SAMMLUNG VERBUND.
Against the backdrop of the spatialization of art in the 1970s, a further section is dedicated to works that deal with the conceptual, poetic and psychological perception of spaces and places. Gordon Matta-Clark saws a house in two, tilts one half by a few degrees and thus creates his 'Anarchitecture' as a critique of conventional architecture.
David Wojnarowicz poetically links his life in New York with that of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. And Ernesto Neto creates a psychologically charged space based on Sigmund Freud's interpretation of dreams, in which a doll dwells in a rocking chair and is mysteriously connected to a superego outside the cage.
The anniversary exhibition presents new acquisitions in the context of 'Gender, Identity & Diversity' that have never been shown in Austria before: Artists create spaces of memory, such as South African-born Lebohang Kganye, who uses photomontages to explore her relationship with her deceased mother, or Kazakhstan-born Alexander Ugay. Based on the Korean diaspora, he traces his ancestors with analog and AI photographs. With her large-format collages, Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo creates scenes that address colonial history, slavery, racism and sexism. Zanele Muholi identifies as non-binary and actively campaigns for LGBTQIA+ rights in South Africa. Muholi's staged self-portraits criticize the Eurocentric view of the black body. Sin Wai Kin deconstructs and reconstructs social narratives and embodies four non-binary identities of a fictional boy group in the video It's Always You.

Works by the artists
Renate Bertlmann, Barbara Bloom, Marcella Campagnano, Veronika Dreier, Renate Eisenegger, VALIE EXPORT, Gerda Fassel, Simon Fujiwara, Simryn Gill, Nan Goldin, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Suzy Lake, Lebohang Kganye, Anne Marie Jehle, Birgit Jürgenssen, Kirsten Justessen, Sin Wai Kin, Joachim Koester, Auguste Kronheim, Brigitte Lang, Louise Lawler, Angelika Loderer, Karin Mack, Gordon Matta-Clark, Anita Münz, Zanele Muholi, Ernesto Neto, ORLAN, Gabriel Orozco, Frida Orupabo, Florentina Pakosta, Margot Pilz, Ingeborg G Pluhar, Elodie Pong, Tomoko Sawada, Senga Nengudi, Elaine Shemilt, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Penny Slinger, Annegret Soltau, Sophie Thun, Alexander Ugay, Jeff Wall, Gillian Wearing, Carrie Mae Weems, Hannah Wilke, Martha Wilson, David Wojnarowicz, Francesca Woodman and Nil Yalter.
February 29 to May 5, 2024, ALBERTINA Vienna
www.verbund.com