The Museum im Bellpark invited Kim Gordon to conceive an exhibition especially tailored to the setting in the former industrialist’s villa. As the exhibition title, Kim Gordon for Design Office, already suggests, the artist masquerades as if she’d be commissioned by a fictitious design office – a label that Kim Gordon has repeatedly employed since her early exhibitions in order to renounce her identity and authorship as an artist. Within this constellation, the relationship between the exhibiting institution and the artist assumes a prime focus, whereby the evolution of the exhibition and the collaboration become themselves the topic.
An important trajectory in the exhibition revolves around the issue of privacy and publicness. Based on a series of so-called Bedroom Paintings and a video work showing Kim Gordon and her daughter Coco Gordon Moore in their everyday surroundings, the exhibition points to the fact that the private should also be thought of politically.
As suggested by Kim Gordon, the exhibition project also involves the artist Josephine Pryde. What they share in common is the unusual way in which they approach the topics of real estate development, gentrification and urban upgrading. A year ago Josephine Pryde photographically staged Kim Gordon’s canvases – adorned with real-estate-branch advertising slogans – against a background scenery of empty apartments and offices in Kriens and Lucerne. These photos, created using purely analogue techniques, evoke a disconcerting and remote atmosphere. From a different perspective, the photos also refer to the question of how works of art can be documented by photography.
- Ralf Keller
