Opening - 13 June, 6 pm -
The exhibition “Artspace Germany” shows 14 works by artists who have lived and worked in Germany for years, but who were born not in Germany but in the Netherlands, England, Switzerland, Turkey, the USA, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Belgium, Australia, Korea, Italy or Poland.

Goethe Institute Hanoi
Exhibition: 13.06 – 23.06.2008
Opening: 13 June, 6 pm

Venue: University of Fine Arts, 42 Yet Kieu Str., Hanoi

Artspace Germany

An exhibition from the ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

The decision of these artists to live in Germany balances the choice of many German artists to settle in New York or, earlier, in Paris. While the modern art market has almost inevitably developed with clearly international characteristics - an early example of globalization - this process of internationalization in Germany began slowly and hesitantly after the war, but has significantly accelerated during the last two decades.

A deciding factor in this development was the fact that with the fall of the wall, Berlin regained its position on a global east-west axis. Simultaneously, however, world-wide art production participated in the global dialectic or dynamic of the dissolution of territorial boundaries, the increasing insignificance of national borders, and the expanding complexity of forms of multiple affiliations and new forms of localization resulting from global migrations.

While the most obvious criteria for choosing the 14 artists was their answer to a common, if already old-fashioned, question (“Where do you come from?”), and their biographies are indicative of successful migrations, the exhibition itself quickly leaves this question behind by simply gathering a good number of convincing, insightful and internationally recognized contemporary art works.

A closer examination, however, reveals the extent to which the works must also be read as self-assertion and self-dramatization by artistic individualists who are constantly changing and exploring their social and aesthetic context. With this exhibition we would like to introduce in Vietnam previously lesser-known artistic positions from Germany.

Participating artists:
Armando
Tony Cragg
Marianne Eigenheer
Ay?e Erkmen
Christine Hill
Magdalena Jetelová
Per Kirkeby
Joseph Kosuth
Marie-Jo Lafontaine
Simone Mangos
Nam June Paik
Giuseppe Spagnulo
Wawrzyniec Tokarski
herman de vries

Goethe Institute Hanoi
13.06 – 23.06.2008
Opening - 13 June, 6 pm

Venue: University of Fine Arts, 42 Yet Kieu Str., Hanoi

The “Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen” – ifa - is an organization operating worldwide to promote artistic exchange and dialogue between civil societies. Ifa’s central field of activities is devising and organizing German contemporary art exhibitions worldwide. Ifa also funds international artists’ exhibition projects, residencies and scholarschips.

In recent years, the Goethe-Institut has presented several ifa exhibitions in Vietnam including “Quobo” (2003), “Consciously Simple” (2003) and masterpieces by Gerhard Richter (2004), Georg Baselitz (2004), Wolfgang Laib (2004) and Sigmar Polke (2005). In 2006 ifa and the Goethe-Institutes in South East Asia organized together the media project “artconnections” with nine German and nine regional artists.

The last big exhibition of ifa in Hanoi, come-in, concerning interior as medium of contemporary art, took place in spring 2007 and gained much attention.

Goethe-Institut Hanoi 56-58 Nguyen Thai Hoc Ba Dinh, Hanoi, Vietnam Tel.: +84 4 7342251 Fax: +84 4 7342254 info@hanoi.goethe.org website