Moment Monument

This publication on the exhibition »Moment.Monument« at Kunst Museum Winterthur presents international positions of contemporary sculpture on the conflicting notions of duration and transitoriness. The exhibition addresses the contradiction between the traditional concept of the monument as a memorial and the processual approaches in contemporary sculpture. In contrast to avant-garde ideas, artistic approaches today no longer have to assert themselves as a radical break with tradition, but rather build on formal research that reaches into the past in a self-evident and calm manner. The approach to historical positions is broad, innovative, diverse and independent. It is further refined by process-oriented approaches, novel materials, and the use of contemporary techniques. In addition, artists expand the historical positions through a content-related or poetic charging of the sometimes self-referential earlier forms. In this process, the enthusiastic citation of historical positions also serves as a method for redefining the concept of the monument. The focus is always on multi-layered strategies of narration and memory that reveal art to the world – as monuments to a present that is as fleeting as it is fragile. Artists: Phyllida Barlow, Dora Budor, Isa Genzken, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mona Hatoum, Bethan Huws, Alicja Kwade, Manfred Pernice, Magali Reus, Thomas Schütte, Gabriel Sierra, Roman Signer, Simon Starling, Danh Võ, Erwin Wurm