With “Shifts”, Iris Touliatou transforms the Kunstverein München into a space for institutional self-reflection. Her exhibition explores the infrastructures and interdependencies that enable and condition cultural production. With precision and subtlety, Touliatou demonstrates how art becomes a means of reflecting on work, the public sphere and one’s own entanglements. This solo exhibition is the artist’s most comprehensive to date in Germany.
The main room of the Kunstverein is dominated by a large-scale installation that resembles an enormous folding screen. On one side of this double-sided wall, the wooden slats of the weathered panels form a dynamic pattern; the other side consists of wall modules that have been assembled into an exhibition display, which, however, remains empty. In this work, Iris Touliatou combines these two support systems from different institutional contexts. The discarded wooden panels originally served as winter covers for sculptures and fountains in Munich’s public spaces.
In a complex and protracted bureaucratic process, the artist corresponded with the State Building Authority and the Bavarian Palace Administration—which, as the legal owner of the panels, is subordinate to the Bavarian State Ministry of Finance and Home Affairs—and finally obtained permission to exhibit these panels. In the exhibition space, these covers for sculptures now become sculptures in their own right; the functional material intended for public use becomes a readymade. Furthermore, the Bavarian Palace Administration is also the landlord of the Kunstverein institution. As a non-profit association, the Kunstverein München is embedded in a network of state funding, municipal grants and dependencies on the Bavarian State. Everything is interwoven with everything else.
Touliatou reveals how ownership, infrastructure and cultural value are negotiated through administrative acts, and impressively demonstrates that cultural institutions, too, are not neutral spaces, but operate within a framework of rules, interdependencies and connections. Throughout the exhibition, Iris Touliatou engages with the spatial, administrative and linguistic conditions and processes associated with the Kunstverein exhibition venue; the institution serves as both a backdrop and a source of material.
Touliatou’s artistic approach can be seen as part of the tradition of institutional critique, in which the functioning, hierarchies and power relations of cultural apparatuses are artistically analysed, exposed and processed. Yet whilst other artists have often adopted a confrontational stance towards the institution, Touliatou pursues a more dialogical strategy. She incorporates key figures, routines and bureaucratic procedures, presenting the institution as a dynamic network of relationships that is renegotiated in real time. The Kunstverein is not merely the host, but simultaneously the subject and the material of the exhibition.
A photographic installation on display in the staircase hall also makes use of this feedback loop. Prior to the actual opening, the artist hosted a preview event. Instead of inviting only the supporting members, as is usually the case, all members of the art association, as well as friends and family, were invited to this occasion. Following a procedure specified by the artist, 300 photographs were taken of this private event; these were compiled into contact sheets and installed in the exhibition space the following morning – before the official opening. This work, too, raises questions regarding the social positioning of the deeply bourgeois institution that is the Kunstverein and its members, as well as more general questions concerning the exclusive nature of the art world and its funding.
In the final room of the Kunstverein, Touliatou employs strategies of inclusion and appropriation. She incorporates the German Theatre Museum, situated in the immediate vicinity of the Kunstverein, duplicating and mirroring it. Its current exhibition, “making THEATRE”, thereby becomes a readymade in its own right, which the artist incorporates into her own exhibition. Under the title “the doublecast scene”—a theatrical term describing when a role is double-cast or an actor or actress plays two roles simultaneously—the Theatre Museum is extended into the Kunstverein’s spaces; through subtle interventions, strategically placed furniture, guest events or appropriated printed materials, the identity and operations of the Kunstverein München are linked with those of the Theatre Museum. In this way, the two exhibitions merge through shared infrastructures such as displays, design and tickets: the exhibition “making THEATRE” becomes an exhibited work, whilst the combined admission ticket, which grants access to both institutions, serves as evidence of this temporary intertwining.
The exhibition “Shifts” combines multi-layered, subtle works to form a complex structure that nevertheless possesses a sensual and poetic dimension. The works are based on conceptual premises and reflect processes of cultural production, presentation and reception. As the final exhibition by the current team at the Kunstverein München, Touliatou’s works can also be understood as a collective self-reflection: a pause that not only analyses the institution itself, but also documents it at a specific point in time. In the midst of a process of transformation, in which new priorities are being set, “Shifts” marks the transition – not as a conclusion, but as a deliberate dissection. Touliatou stages the institution at the moment of change and demonstrates that even her critique is itself part of continuity and transformation.
Kunstverein München, Galeriestraße 4, 80539 München.
