26 May 2016

The KMD – Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp has a New Exhibition Building

The world's 'tiniest' museum inaugurates a new building designed by Swiss architect Jonathan Banz with a solo show by German conceptual artist Karin Sander.

On this occasion, the German edition of our award-winning publication on Eilshemius (Louis Michel Eilshemius und sein Einfluss auf Marcel Duchamp, Verlag für moderne Kunst, Wien) will be presented as well.

'With the dazzling reflections on its shiny copper dome, the rather abstract form of the new KMD awakens associations with industrial objects, with, for example, an antique diving helmet or a hurricane lamp that warns ships on Lake Geneva in stormy weather. 'Who found it?' the building seems to be asking us. For all these awakened associations, the new KMD is a precisely designed and engineered work that illuminates the relationship between architecture and object.

The definition of an object begins with its sensory or mental perception. Kaolin, feldspar and quartz are red to make porcelain and, within the milieu and scope of social norms, anatomical studies and industrial mass-production, this material serves to manufacture an object that is clearly perceived as a urinal, and this object in turn, on the decision of a certain Marcel Duchamp, has been declared a work of art. Architectture, at first glance, has nothing to do with this perspective of the object as the genesis of art. And yet architecture itself is composed from a whole diversity of single objects: foundations, walls, windows, roofs and domes that can be clearly recognized and designated. Indeed, a finished building is, in our perception of it, often broken down into its individual component parts: the facade in front of which we are standing, the room in which we are gathered ...

The new building of the KMD has been so designed that the museum itself is presented as an object, thus blurring the boundaries between exhibition room and sculpture. This robust building has the presence of a cultural institution and as such invites the visitor to take a fresh look at the architectured world about him.'

(excerpt of a text by Adrian Pöllinger, which can be found in its integrality here: www.akmd.ch/exhibitions-2016/)