Roger M. Buergel

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Roger M. Buergel (June 2007)

Roger Martin Buergel (born September 26, 1962 in Berlin ) is a German exhibition maker , critic and lecturer . Since 2012 he has been director of the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich , which he redesigned as a research institution for global modernity. Buergel was artistic director of documenta 12 (2007), the Busan Biennale “Garden of Learning” (2012) and the Suzhou Biennale “Suzhou Documents” (2016). His curatorial and theoretical work focuses on post-conceptual exhibition practice and the “migration of form”.

Life

Roger M. Buergel grew up in West Berlin and Bremen . From 1983 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and studied with exhibition organizer Johannes Gachnang at the Institute for Contemporary Art . From 1985 to 1987 he worked as the private secretary of the Viennese actionist Hermann Nitsch and studied philosophy and economics at the University of Vienna . From the 1990s he worked and researched in London , Cambridge , Paris , Moscow , Barcelona , the USA and Eastern Europe . The most important interlocutors of these years include Kaja Silverman , Leo Bersani , Catherine David , Manuel J. Borja-Villel and Allan Sekula . In 1995 Buergel was one of the founders of the magazine springerin - Hefte für Gegenwartskunst . A long-term collaboration with the art space of the University of Lüneburg began with an exhibition on the question of historiography in the arts (1997) . For his curatorial work, Buergel was the first to receive the Walter Hopps Award from the Menil Collection (Houston) in 2002. In 2003 Buergel was elected artistic director of documenta 12 . In the years that followed, his working relationships with artists and curators from the African continent, Brazil , India , China , South Korea and Japan , including Koyo Kouoh , Gavin Jantjes , Zhang Qing, Shinji Kohmoto , Amar Kanwar and Marta Kuzma , deepened . From 2007 to 2009 Buergel taught as a visiting professor for art history at the Karlsruhe Art Academy . Since 2012 he has been head of the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich . Roger M. Buergel lives in Zurich and Berlin .

Exhibitions

Exhibitions before 2007

Things We Don't Understand at the Generali Foundation Vienna (2000) was the first major institutional exhibition that Buergel curated together with Ruth Noack . In contrast to primarily discursive debates about the political potential of art, the exhibition was dedicated to the interrelationship between forms of power, everyday life and aesthetic difference. In the same year Buergel realized the governmentality exhibition . Art dealing with the international hyper-bourgeoisie and the international petty bourgeoisie in the Alte Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover, 2000. As a critical commentary on the Austria Pavilion at EXPO2000 , the exhibition examined forms of indirect government and the aesthetics of political protest.

The concept of governmentality , coined by the late Michel Foucault , also inspired the international exhibition series “The Government” (2003-2005), which Buergel realized with various partner institutions (including the art space of the University of Lüneburg , MACBA Barcelona, ​​MAC Miami, Secession Vienna and the formerly known as Witte de With Rotterdam ). For the preparation of the exhibition Com volem ser governats? (2004) together with the MACBA Barcelona, ​​Buergel convened an advisory board of citizens in order to ensure the connection of the exhibition to local political and social debates. He should keep this method of local collaboration in all of his major exhibitions. Ruth Noack acted as co-curator at the exhibition stations in Miami , Vienna and Rotterdam .

documenta 12

Buergel was artistic director of documenta 12 in Kassel , which he curated together with Ruth Noack (2007). Buergel's concept was based on three openly formulated leitmotifs: Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? and what to do Within a network of magazines led by Georg Schöllhammer, these questions were taken up, discussed, processed and published in special issues in different places around the world.

Another concept of documenta 12 was the curatorial method of “migration of form” developed by Buergel: Instead of viewing the artistic works as self-contained entities, the aim was to sound out formal and content-related correspondences between works from different eras and geopolitical contexts. The focus was on non-Western and feminist art , but the established distinctions between art and non-art (e.g. handicrafts , fashion and cooking ) were undermined.

Buergel and Noack presented artists and objects, many of which were previously unknown in the West (including Ai Weiwei , Charlotte Posenenske , Alina Szapocznikow and Nasreen Mohamedi ), placed a focus on the art of the 1960s and 1970s and gave references to historical references by non-western artists.

Buergel and Noack relied less on well-known or marketable names, but on a polemical correction of the canon - a selection concept that attracted a lot of criticism and was covered by comments such as “Resterampe der Kunstgeschichte”. What was also new was the principle that many artists were present with several works at different exhibition locations.

The design of the exhibition rooms was characterized by an unusual color scheme and materiality: it was common to show contemporary art in neutrally lit " white cubes ", Buergel accentuated the room image with pink, green and blue tones for the walls, and used auratic spot lighting or created a shadowy atmosphere with curtains. This form of spatial design, which made visiting the exhibition itself an aesthetic experience, was interpreted by critics - similar to the migration of form - as a curatorial encroachment. Afterwards, however, Buergel's exhibition design was reassessed and discussed as an early example of an “immersive” curatorial practice that actively includes the body and the affective-sensory perception of the viewer.

Another innovation at documenta 12 was the inclusion of a local advisory board under the direction of Ayse Gülec, which worked out the transcultural character of the city of Kassel and made it accessible to the artists, as well as the initiation of an extensive collaborative communication concept in which, for example, schoolchildren led the visitors. The approach of documenta 12 strengthened the field of art mediation insofar as the mediators no longer conveyed the official curatorial reading to the public, but were encouraged to give their own, also critical interpretations.

Exhibitions since 2007

At the invitation of the Museum DKM in Duisburg , Buergel curated a retrospective by Ai Weiwei in 2010 . Against the rampant hype surrounding the artist, “Barely Something” tried to work out the finer strands of Ai's artistic thinking, in particular the interplay between Chinese and modernist forms. In 2012 Buergel became artistic director of the 8th Busan Biennale 2012, which he designed under the title “Garden of Learning” as an experiment with the Korean public. In the form of a “Learning Council”, around 80 citizens and schoolchildren were included in the highly improvised process of exhibition design.

In 2016, Buergel curated the first Suzhou Biennale with Zhang Qing . Under the title “Suzhou Documents. Histories of a Global Hub ”, the exhibition extended over various historical sites and gardens of the former Ming metropolis and examined the difficult relationship between contemporary China and its feudal antiquity.

From 2015 to 2018, Buergel worked for the first time with the encyclopedic collection of a major arts and crafts museum , the Hamburg Museum for Art and Industry . This resulted in “Mobile Worlds”, an exhibition that he conceived and realized together with the cultural sociologist Sophia Prinz, the aim of which was to replace the traditional museological narrative . For this purpose, departments that are based on cultural identities in the spirit of the 19th century ("China", "Islam", "Modernity") were exploded so that the objects can be arranged according to their complex origins in the sense of a "poetics of relation" ( Glissant ) regrouped. Collaborations were also decisive for “Mobile Worlds”: both with the curators of the museum, but also with experts in post-migrant everyday life (activists, schoolchildren, etc.). While the Süddeutsche Zeitung attacked Buergel as a “shaman of ignorance” and his method of decontextualization, the New York Times selected “Mobile Worlds” as one of the “global highlights” in 2018.

Johann Jacobs Museum

Buergel has been director of the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich since 2012 , which he gave a thematic reorientation at the invitation of the Jacobs family , which was combined with a redesign of the museum premises by the Basel architects Miller & Maranta . In a small format, but always in collaboration with contemporary artists (mostly from the African continent , South America and Northeast Asia ), Buergel works here on questions of method of exhibiting in global contexts. The exhibitions start with the trade routes for products such as coffee , cocoa , crude oil , opium , rubber , sugar and silk in order to reveal the social, economic and aesthetic interdependencies of the (post-) colonial world. The priorities so far have been the curatorial work of the Italian-Brazilian architect and designer Lina Bo Bardi in northeastern Brazil in the 1950s, the “Haitian footage” by the avant-garde filmmaker, dancer and anthropologist Maya Deren , the Omoshirogara kimonos , which were introduced in the late 19th century . Century document the Japanese wrestling with modernization and an archeology of the world exhibitions of the 19th century.

Teaching

In addition to his curatorial work, Buergel has had regular teaching assignments since 2000: as a lecturer in the exhibition series "Die Government" at the University of Lüneburg (2002-2005), as a visiting professor for art history at the Karlsruhe Art Academy (2007-2009), as a visiting professor for art history at the University of Zurich (2016) and since 2019 as professor at the European Graduate School for Philosophy , Art and Critical Thinking . In addition, he has led numerous international seminars and workshops for artists and students.

Publications

Buergel gave the anthology Abstract Expressionism together with Vera Kockot . Painting between sublimity and vulgarity (1999, Verlag der Kunst), which was preceded by two exhibitions and a lengthy research with Michael Leja at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1999 his monograph on Peter Friedl was published (1999, Verlag der Kunst). On the occasion of documenta 12 , an accompanying exhibition catalog and a “picture book” were published in 2007 . In addition to numerous exhibition catalogs and essays on artists such as Lina Bo Bardi , Dierk Schmidt and Alejandra Riera , which have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, Buergel dedicated a longer monographic text in the same name to Ai Weiwei on the occasion of the Barely Something (2010) exhibition in the Duisburg Museum DKM Ai Weiwei Exhibition catalog. In 2015, Buergel published the volume “Das Jacobs Haus” on the history and realignment of the Johann Jacobs Museum , which he directed . For 2021, the monograph “ Migration of Form. A museum and its method ”planned (together with Sophia Prinz), in which the theory, methods and experiences of the museum are presented.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b documenta 12: leitmotifs. Retrieved July 6, 2020 .
  2. ^ Roger M. Buergel: documenta 12: The migration of form . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed July 1, 2020]).
  3. ↑ Bidoun: Documenta 12. Retrieved on July 1, 2020 (English).
  4. ↑ Niklas Maak, head of the art department in the features section of the FAZ in the Hessische Allgemeine from August 4, 2007
  5. ↑ Holger Liebs: Elegant in the broom closet. Retrieved July 6, 2020 .
  6. ^ Adrian Searle: Documenta 12 leaves Adrian Searle lost and confused . In: The Guardian . June 19, 2007, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed July 1, 2020]).
  7. ↑ Quiet the star. In: K.WEST. September 2010, accessed January 30, 2014.
  8. ↑ Enter 'Garden of Learning' in Busan. October 15, 2012, accessed July 1, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung: The shaman of ignorance. Retrieved July 1, 2020 .
  10. ^ Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter, Jason Farago: Best Art of 2018 . In: The New York Times . December 5, 2018, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed July 1, 2020]).
  11. ↑ documenta 12: Edition. Retrieved July 1, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Buergel, Roger M.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Buergel, Roger Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German exhibition organizer, critic and lecturer
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin