The exhibition, curated by Germano Celant in dialogue with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas, reconstructs “Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form”, a show curated by Harald Szeemann at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969, which went down in history for the curator’s radical approach to exhibition practice, conceived as a linguistic medium.
In a surprising remaking of the exhibition from 1969 in the historical architectural and environmental structure of Ca’ Corner della Regina, the show maintains the original visual and formal relations and links between the works. The project has posed a series of questions on the complexity and very meaning of the project, which has developed through a profound debate from various perspectives: the artistic, the architectural and the curatorial. This was the challenge: find and communicate a limit to a non-limit, creating a place that would reflect exactly the architectural structures of the Kunsthalle, but also an asymmetrical space with respect to present time and imbued with an energy and tension equivalent to that felt at Bern.
Underlining and highlighting the transition from the past to the present, it has been decided to graft the exhibition in its totality—walls, floors, installations and artworks— onto the historical architectural and environmental structure of Ca’ Corner della Regina, thereby inserting—on a full-size scale—the modern rooms of the Kunsthalle, delimited by white wall surfaces, into the ancient frescoed and decorated halls of the Venetian palazzo. The project has entailed the understanding that the language with which an exhibition is mounted and the relations between the works set out by its curator have become a founding element of the history of modern and contemporary art.
Venue of the exhibition: Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice
