Art – a public matter? Ever since their opening to the general public in the 1780s, the Belvedere Gardens have been used extensively as places for recreation and communality. The occasion of the 300th anniversary of the completion of the Upper Belvedere is a good opportunity to emphasize that they are clearly also places of art.

The work of Goshka Macuga (Warsaw, 1967) addresses the relationships between art, power and inherited narratives around historical facts and characters. Her work connects different fields and research methods, and is often based on an investigation of institutional accounts. Macuga proposes unconventional associative readings of social and political events.

Inside 6 exhibition levels of Torre, project “Atlas”, emerged from a dialogue between Miuccia Prada and Germano Celant, is unveiled. It hosts works from the Prada Collection displayed in a sequence of environments incorporating solos and confrontations, created through assonances or contrasts, between artists such as Carla Accardi and Jeff Koons, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer and Pino Pascali, William N. Copley and Damien Hirst, John Baldessari and Carsten Höller.
From Thursday 17 June the fourth floor of Torre reopens to the public with a new display featuring works by artists Goshka Macuga and Betye Saar.

Goshka Macuga (Warsaw, Poland, 1967) brings into focus the relationships between art, power, and history in her practice. Her works comprise large installations that mix her own pieces with material found in archives and collections to explore new interpretations of inherited narratives of historical events and characters. Macuga engages with continuous recycling of images and accounts, a method inspired by art historian Aby Warburg who juxtaposed thematically or aesthetically related images from different historical periods to create a visual continuum. Macuga blends together the items in her installations and builds narratives focused on a single event or on revealing relationships and connections between a priori unrelated historical characters. Her works suggests new interpretations of the political and social events.

IN FLUX is the first presentation of the artist"s work in Spanish territory. Curated by Neus Miró, the show aims to showcase some of her more renowned installations: Plus Ultra (2009), Untitled (2011), and The Nature of the Beast (2010). Each of them explores and reinterpret inherited narratives regarding historical events and characters. 

Goshka Macuga’s sculpture takes influence from the status check of space missions (go/no go testing referring to a pass/fail test principle) before a rocket launch can proceed. It feels as though we are at the end of an era post-covid, but also at the beginning of a new one; a possible take-off fuelled by uncertainty.

The new work pays homage to Chantal Akerman, Belgian pioneer cineaste and visual artist; Andrée Blouin, pan-African political activist and member of the first democratically elected government of post-independence Congo; Patricia De Martelaere, philosopher, professor and author; Marie Popelin, the first woman doctor in Law in Belgium and key-figure in the international women’s movement; and Mathilde Schroyens, the first woman mayor of Antwerp and reformer of the city’s education system. Macuga contoured the profiles of these women and cast the outlines in rubber. The negative portraits that result from this process refer to the overwhelming absence of female figures in the collective memory and the public imaginary, and to the often invisible nature of intellectual and artistic labour and innovation.

Through works that bring together objects, movement, or the living body, The Paradox of Stillness explores the intersections between performance and visual art. The exhibition features some 100 artworks by successive generations of artists who test the boundaries between stillness and motion, mortality and time.

Goshka Macuga’s exhibition, The Death of Marxism, presents series of artworks that are an effect of diverse forms of creative practice – artistic research, appropriations, and collages. It focuses on the theme of the kaleidoscopic complexity of historical and personal narratives of the past.

The maquette of the Macuga’s proposed work will be exhibited at The National Gallery, London in May 2021 with two selected proposals announced this summer from the Six shortlisted artists. The works will be unveiled in Trafalgar Square in 2022 and 2024 respectively. 

The other five shortlisted artists include: Samson Kambalu, Nicole Eisenman, Ibrahim Mahama, Teresa Margolles and Paloma Varga Weisz.

Exhibition M, Goshka Macuga's large-scale Jacquard tapestry, will hang in the atrium of the Cullman Education and Research Building and has been specifically produced for this space. The work re-stages a well-known photograph of Andre Malraux taken in 1954 by Maurice Jarnoux for the magazine Paris Match, featuring Macuga surrounded by images that are intrinsically linked to MoMA’s history and collection.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, the Kestner Gesellschaft is presenting a solo exhibition by the Polish-British artist Goshka Macuga (*1967 in Warsaw, lives and works in London). In her work, Macuga questions historiography, especially key ideas of modernism such as a belief in progress, authorship, and utopia. In detective-like research, she finds breaks, pitfalls, and ambiguities in a supposedly linear narrative. This exhibition focuses on the Bauhaus, the influential school of art, architecture, and design, and its connection to the Kestner Gesellschaft. From 24 May to 4 August 2019, installations, sculptures, textiles, and collages by Goshka Macuga will be on view throughout the building. The artist is creating new works specifically for the exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft in collaboration with the London lighting designer Michael Anastassiades.

Prada presents What Was I?, a new exhibition project conceived by Goshka Macuga, with the support of Fondazione Prada. On view from 23 March to 2 June 2019, it will take place in the premises of Prada Rong Zhai, a 1918 historical residence in Shanghai restored by Prada and reopened in October 2017. What Was I? is a kaleidoscopic journey in the post-Anthropocene epoch, after the collapse of humankind due to the effects of technological overdevelopment. The protagonist of this unexpected voyage is an android created by Macuga and produced in Japan by A Lab for the exhibition presented in 2016 at the Milan venue of Fondazione Prada. 

The Polish-British artist Goshka Macuga (born 1967) works in the field of installations, using media as varied as photo collage, sculpture, large-format tapestry, video and performance. She is known for her diverse approach that extends to the curatorial and the narrative. Using extensive artistic research, she develops storylines for her works and exhibitions in which she combines fiction and history. Her “materials” are pivotal moments in human history, as well as works by other artists, which she stages in playful displays.Macuga is interested in the myriad connections within cultural history, especially that of the international avant-gardes of the twentieth century.