Breaking Free. The collections

Breaking Free. The collections
November 1, 2024 – February 9, 2025
Mönchsberg, level 1

With works by Ernst Caramelle, VALIE EXPORT, Peter Friedl, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Angelika Loderer, Stephen Mathewson, David Moises, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Şener Özmen, Andrew Phelps, Nicole Schatt, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau

The exhibition Breaking Free picks up where Playing Rules!, the preceding presentation of art from the collections, left off to delve deeper into the theme of “play.” The free play of forces can help us overcome limitations, call the familiar and customary in question, and reduce the distance between work of art and beholder. At the same time, play is a special way of experiencing the world. It is a metaphor for community life and an engine driving cultural change. Relishing play, we discover our individual qualities and abilities, while playful cooperation and rivalry teach us how rules and systems work and what it means to break and subvert them.

The exhibition is organized around a series of thematic emphases: it examines the community-building role of sports and the appropriation of urban space by youth subcultures; probes the question of the interdependency between humans and ecosystems; and highlights interaction as a cognitive tool, as in the engagement with media and social realities. Not coincidentally, several works are invitations from the artists to the audience to get in on the game: it is often immediate experience that lets us perceive and understand underlying structures and processes.

The exhibition is jointly presented by the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and the Generali Foundation. It is part of the exhibition series The Collections, which brings together the eminent art collections preserved at the museum.