
“The New Public: From a New Public Dimension to New Users”
MUSEION of Modern and Contemporary Art Bolzano
Piazza Piero Siena Platz 1
September 15, 2012–January 13, 2013
Curated by Rein Wolfs
Europe is currently being shaken by a socioeconomic crisisone that is both the product of and the justification for privatization on a massive scale. The European public’s reactionor the almost complete lack thereofsuggests that their sense of the res publica has greatly diminished. Against this, curator Rein Wolfs posits the emergence of a “New Public,” expressions of which he identifies in recent work by fourteen artists, including Juliette Blightman, Christian Jankowski, Erik van Lieshout, Helen Marten, Danh Vo, and the Dutch research studio Metahaven. With this hypothesisfleshed out and contextualized in the accompanying catalogue by Federico Campagna, Maria Lind, and himselfWolfs sets the stakes high, and the fact that the show is taking place in a publicly funded institution may help convey just how real those stakes are.