Art in Motion. 100 Masterpieces with and through Media

ZKM Karlsruhe, 14.07.2018 - 10.02.2019

The exhibition presents time-based media arts as the foremost innovation in the arts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; as the moving history of the art of motion utilizing technical devices: from cinema to kinetics, from light to sound. The introduction of motion into art set art itself in motion.The subtitle of the exhibition’s title references a popular German TV series, »100 Masterpieces«, of the 1980s, which in media historical terms indicates a blind spot: although the series was broadcast by the electronic medium of television, the majority of masterpieces it featured were executed in traditional image media such as painting. In addition to well-known positions in media art such as Nam June Paik, Maya Deren, John Cage, Lynn Hershman, Sergei Eisenstein, Ulrike Rosenbach, Zhang Peili, Bill Viola und Michael Snow, the exhibition presents important pioneering achievements in the field of media art that have so far received little or no attention in art discourse, such as Mary Ellen Bute, Zdeněk Pešánek, Ivan Ladislav Galeta und Waldemar Cordeiro.