Honey, I Rearranged The Collection

Extended until 16. Feb. 2017

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HONEY, I REARRANGED THE COLLECTION is a three-part presentation of works from the collection that opened at the end of April 2016. Over the next three years, the exhibition will explore essential realms of human knowledge and experience: how people relate to things, how people relate to each other, and finally how we relate to the space that surrounds us. The show entices visitors to (re)discover the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s collection of contemporary art in all its breadth and diverse facets. Like the characters in a play or a book, some artworks will make only a cameo appearance in certain scenes or chapters while others will be “on stage” continuously throughout all three parts of the presentation, giving us a chance to see them in a new light and read them in different ways in these changing contexts.

Kicking off the trilogy is The Magic of Things. Perfidious Objects (2016), which tells of our relationship with things in the wake of the “material turn”. Things – utilitarian objects, collectibles and status symbols – dominate our daily lives to a large degree. But sometimes, these things seem to take on a life of their own, putting up a fight, interrupting what we’re doing or spinning out of control. Artists evoke the potential in this perfidy in diverse and captivating ways.

The title HONEY, I REARRANGED THE COLLECTION was borrowed from a group of works from the late 1960s by the American artist Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944) that propose dozens of sensible but also humorous and absurd ways to reorganise a collection.

# 1 The Magic of Things. Perfidious Objects (2016)
# 2 Help Me Hurt Me. Between Care and Cruelty (2017)
# 3 Bouncing in the Corner. Surveying Space (2018)

Artists represented in the show The Magic of Things. Perfidious Objects: Lothar Baumgarten, Anna and Bernhard Blume, KP Brehmer, Thorsten Brinkmann, Bogomir Ecker, Domenico Gnoli, Andreas Gursky, Raymond Hains, Jeppe Hein, Almut Heise, Candida Höfer, Rebecca Horn, Christian Jankowski, Konrad Klapheck, Louise Lawler, Annette Messager, Reinhard Mucha, Claes Oldenburg, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Sigmar Polke, Bernhard Prinz, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, Dieter Roth, Allen Ruppersberg, Jörg Sasse, Wiebke Siem, Andreas Slominski, Andy Warhol.