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Poka Yio, Self-Decapitated, 2005, Courtesy The Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens.

Kiki Smith, Untitled (Hanging Woman), 1992, Courtesy The Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens.

Kunsthalle Vienna
Museumplatz1
A-1070 Vienna
43-15-85-21-89-33
Dream & Trauma,
Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens
June 29-October 4, 2007

"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams."

— Elias Canetti

Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens — a joint project with Kunsthalle Wien and MUMOK. The exhibition approaches two phenomena that draw on the unconscious, the dream as well as the psychic injury — the trauma, with over forty contemporary artistic positions.

Dreams and trauma are dimensions of experience. In particular ways, both generate imaginary worlds of the mind and fantastic scenarios. The dream, companion of sleep, belongs to everyday life and links various states of being: “To die, to sleep, to sleep: perchance to dream,” says Hamlet and thus delineates essential experiential parameters. In contrast reality manifests in the trauma as a psychic deformation and a symbolic wound. This non-zone of formlessness and fragmentation collects what has been suppressed or has disappeared from the conscious. Sigmund Freud defined trauma as an experience that brings such an increase in stimulation to the inner life in such a short period of time that the normal usual way of dealing with or processing the experience fails.

Works from Nigel Cooke, Olafur Eliasson, Kiki Smith and Christopher Wool underscore this precarious status of existence and bear witness that the imaginative unfolding of gloomy, twilight worlds reveals the impossibility of depicting traumatic experience since, as an inner shock, the experience resists symbolic transformation.

An aesthetics of trauma depicts forms of pain, fear and injury, as in the works of William Kentridge or Cindy Sherman; these forms are often inscribed in the body, as in the works of Paul McCarthy or Kiki Smith; it shows the wounds of being and the injury of the existential and depicts inner states of feeling, altered, crazy and uncanny perceptions of reality (Robert Gober). The aesthetics turn toward the abject, visualize the suppressed, the revolting and degenerate; thus the work of Gregory Crewdson, Urs Fischer, Tim Noble/Sue Webster and Cindy Sherman reveal wishes, desires and tormenting dreams.

Drawings by a younger generation — Tauba Auerbach, Paul Chan, Brian DeGraw, Marcel Dzama, Adam Helms, Cameron Jamie, Dorota Jurczak, Dimitris Protopapas, Georgia Sagri, Christiana Soulou, Aurel Schmidt and Ralf Ziervogel belong — often communicate an impression of the unconscious in expressive and fear network unconscious instead of the conscious and to follow André Breton’s saying: “Where the ego was, the id should be.”

Dream and Trauma is in two parts: Hall 2 of the Kunsthalle Wien contains mainly large drawings and photographs by Gregory Crewdson, Anna Gaskell and Cindy Sherman. Artistic emphasis is given by Paul Chan, Urs Fischer, Robert Gober and Kiki Smith. Influenced by the maxim that a detour is the most direct path to the goal, objects by Urs Fischer, Jeff Koons, and Poka and hinder the visitor’s route. The curatorial focus on the borderline, on the one hand emphasizes the borders between the conscious and the unconscious, on the other hand, underlines the inaccessibility of the suppressed psychological content of the unconscious.

Dakis Joannou counts as one of the most important collectors of contemporary art in the world. For the last thirty years, the Greek businessman has relied on his unwavering intuition for up founder of the Deste Foundation For Contemporary Art, Athens where the biggest exhibition of his collection in the last few years with the title Monument to Now has been shown. In 2005 Dakis Joannou presented part of his collection with its focus on Translation in the Tokyo Palace in Paris. It was the first presentation of his works outside Greece. The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Wien and in MUMOK also has a thematic focus: Dream and Trauma.

Artists: Pawel Althamer, Tauba Auerbach, Hisham Bharoocha, Maurizio Cattelan, Paul Chan, Nigel Cooke, Gregory Crewdson, Gerald Davis, Brian DeGraw, Nathalie Djurberg, Marcel Dzama, Olafur Eliasson, Urs Fischer, Naomi Fisher, Saul Fletcher, Barnaby Furnas, Anna Gaskell, Robert Gober, Matt Greene, Oliver Halsman Rosenberg, Adam Helms, Cameron Jamie, Dorota Jurczak, William Kentridge, Jeff Koons, Friedrich Kunath, Matt Leines, Ashley Macomber, Paul McCarthy, Tim Noble/Sue Webster, Chris Ofili, Poka Schmidt, Cindy Sherman, Dasha Shishkin, Kiki Smith, Nedko Solakov, Christiana Soulou, Alex Stein, Nari Ward, Christopher Wool, Ralf Ziervogel.

MUMOK
Museum Moderner Kunst
Stiftung Ludwig Wien
MuseumsQuartier
Museumsplatz 1
+43-1-525 00
Vienna
Dream & Trauma,
Works from the Dakis Joannou collection, Athens
June 29 -October 4, 2007

Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou collection, Athens – a joint project with Kunsthalle Wien and MUMOK. The exhibition approaches the two phenomena that draw on the unconscious, the dream as well as the psychic injury – the trauma, with over 40 contemporary artistic positions.

Dream and trauma are regarded as opposites that have a lot in common: the psychoanalytical background, the phenomena of the unconscious and suppression and, not least, their power of transcendence. An aesthetics of the traumatic as found in the works of William Kentridge or Cindy Sherman visualises forms of pain, fear and injury, it shows wounds to the essence of being and existential wounding. It depicts inner states of feeling, altered, crazy and uncanny perceptions of reality (Robert Gober), fragmented bodies (Paul McCarthy, Anna Gaskell) and remnant forms (Urs Fischer). It discovers an art that, in the works of Gregory Crewdson, Tim Noble/Sue Webster, visualises the repressed and depraved and so uncovers pain-filled wishes, desires and dreams. Dreams and trauma reveal their imaginary power in the tension between absence and presence; repression and a surfeit of emotion; abstraction (Olafur Eliasson, Christopher Wool) and visual overload (Aurel Schmidt, Ralf Ziervogel).

In the darkened rooms of the MUMOK’s court stables those works that above all, visualize the dark side of human existence can be seen in an arrangement. In a metaphorical memorial room, two installation works form the centre: Amazing Grace by Nari Ward, an accumulation of 280 old children’s prams and flatly pressed, fire brigade hoses: and Your Strange Certainty Still Kept, an illuminated water curtain by Olafur Eliasson.

Dakis Joannou is regarded as one of the most important collectors of contemporary art in the world. The Greek businessman founded the Deste Foundation in 1983 with its own exhibition space. After the first presentation outside of Greece in the Palais de Tokyo (2005) in Paris, Dream and Trauma is the second largest thematic exhibition with works from his collection.

In collaboration with Deste Foundation For Contemporary Art, Athens.

Participating artists: Pawel Althamer, Tauba Auerbach, Hisham Bharoocha, Maurizio Cattelan, Paul Chan, Nigel Cooke, Gregory Crewdson, Gerald Davis, Brian DeGraw, Nathalie Djurberg, Marcel Dzama, Olafur Eliasson, Urs Fischer, Naomi Fisher, Saul Fletcher, Barnaby Furnas, Anna Gaskell, Robert Gober, Matt Greene, Oliver Halsman Rosenberg, Adam Helms, Cameron Jamie, Dorota Jurczak, William Kentridge, Jeff Koons, Friedrich Kunath, Matt Leines, Ashley Macomber, Paul McCarthy, Tim Noble/Sue Webster, Chris Ofili, Poka-Yio, Dimitris Protopapas, Georgia Sagri, Aurel Schmidt, Cindy Sherman, Dasha Shishkin, Kiki Smith, Nedko Solakov, Christiana Soulou, Alex Stein, Nari Ward, Christopher Wool, Ralf Ziervogel.

Curators: Edelbert Köb (Director MUMOK), Gerald Matt (Director Kunsthalle Wien), Angela Stief (Kunsthalle Wien)