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GHOST RIDER EXHIBITION BY TILO SCHULZ
20. März -17. April 2009
Institute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros
The exhibition project GHOST RIDER by German artist Tilo Schulz takes as its point of departure the story of Noel Field, an American diplomat and left-wing intellectual, who was accused to be an imperialist spy infiltrating Eastern Europe. He was arrested in 1949 in Prague, and was detained in a Hungarian prison in Budapest till 1954. Even though Field never appeared in court in person, he is being considered as one of the key figures in the so-called show trials in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia.
Referring to the Field case on a rather abstract level, the exhibition focuses on representational issues related both to art and to history. Tilo Schulz?s artistic practice generally intends to challenge stereotypical mindsets and to question existing cultural narratives as well as relations of dominance, with special regard to those connected with events, facts, and imagination concerning the cold war era. His works ? often complex assemblies of spaces, wall paintings, documents and referential objects ? pursue on the one hand an investigation into the formalisation of ideologies. On the other hand, they reflect on the ideological content of form. Through the Field story the exhibition opens up for discussion the issues of visibility-invisibility, presence-absence, information-manipulation, knowledge-speculation.
According to writings about totalitarian regimes, the manipulation of coherences results in intrinsically true facts being put a in the wrong light. Tilo Schulz?s exhibition elaborates the actual impact of this logical distortion both on the cognitive and the emotional level. The spatial arrangement of the elements that were conceived for the spaces of the ICA-D and the contrasting quality of the applied materials directly appeal to the perception of the visitors and have an impact on their connotations. At the same time the display self-reflexively questions the format of exhibitions as well as the role art and art institutions play in the construction of meaning.
GHOST RIDER has been developed against the historical and socio-cultural backdrop of Dunaújváros, the ideal new city that was built from scratch in the 1950s.
Tilo Schulz (1972) has been widely exhibiting internationally since the mid-1990s and has done significant curatorial work as well. His latest solo exhibitions include FORMSCHÖN (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, STAGE DIVER (2008) at the Secession Vienna and I WAS SHOT IN THE BACK (2008) at the Blackwood Gallery Toronto. He also participated in the group show ?The Leipzig Phenomenon? at the Kunsthalle Budapest last year. The Institute of Contemporary Art ? Dunaújváros is proud to present the first solo exhibition of Tilo Schulz in Hungary.
The exhibition was supported by: The City of Dunaújváros, Goethe Institute Budapest, ifa - Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Kunsthalle Budapest, National Cultural Fund, Romanian Cultural Institute Budapest
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