Liam Gillick Venice Biennale Lecture at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

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Liam Gillick Venice Biennale Lecture at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

March 26, 2009

This video shows an excerpt of the lecture Liam Gillick held last month (February 12, 2009) at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (the full length version (44:45 Min.) is available after the jump. The lecture was organized within the framework of his upcoming exhibition in Venice as the German contribution to the 53rd Venice Biennial. Liam Gillick was chosen to conceptualize the German Pavilion by Nicolaus Schafhausen, curator of the German contribution to the 2009 Biennale di Venezia and director of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. The lecture developed the themes first elaborated by Liam Gillick in the Hermes Lecture, Den Bosch (Netherlands) in November 2008.

Liam Gillick (born 1964) is a British artist living and working in New York and London.The exhibition at the German Pavilion is commissioned by the Federal Foreign Office and will be realised together with the Institute of Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa).

Liam Gillick Lecture at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, Germany. February 12, 2009. Video by Martin Griessmüller.

For more videos about Liam Gillick’s work click here.

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Excerpt from the press release:

In his lecture Liam Gillick (born 1964) will speak about a discursive model of art practice that he has developed over the past two decades. It is a model characterised by an open yet critical orientation towards the social context of art. Interdisciplinarity, collaboration and a focus on production process are some of its other notable qualities. Gillick will examine this model against the background of the post-war welfare state with its soft organisational frameworks and collaborative structures. He will also relate it to developments in Scandinavian car manufacturing in the 1970’s, when teamwork and self-organisation were introduced and monotonous forms of assembly line work were abolished. His lecture may be regarded as a search for the cultural DNA that these artistic and socio-economic phenomena possibly share. It takes a look at an interesting perspective surrounding his previous work, which can be expected for Venice.

“In the Volvo factory you can see trees while you are making cars. But you are still making cars, never taking a walk in the woods. Where are the models for contemporary art production in the recent past?”

Since the 1990’s Liam Gillick has addressed emergent post-socialist systems and new social models in Europe. The theme of his work is the varied phenomena of social utopias that he stages via hypothetical social models, both visual and literary.

Liam Gillick Lecture at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, 2009. Berlin, February 12, 2009. Complete lecture (44:45 Min.):