VADUZ.- In her works, performance and multimedia artist Martina Morger (b. 1989 in Vaduz) takes a critical look at the social issues of our times. The winner of the Manor Cultural Prize (St. Gallen, 2021) has curated the exhibition Are We Dead Yet? that kicks off Artist’s Choice, a new series of exhibitions in which artists are invited to select works from the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein collection in order to stage a presentation. The aim here is to “re-energise” the museum’s collection by subjecting it to timely critical scrutiny.

Martina Morger has already dealt variously with the economic conditions of our capitalist achievement society, in which she also grew up. In her sometimes uncompromising artistic work she identifies gaps, speaks the unspoken, points out relations or discrepancies and encourages people to think further. Acting as curator, in Are We Dead Yet? Morger takes the same approach, exhibiting works that prompt reflection on the phenomenon of ubiquitous exhaustion in our society.

Are we dead yet? Or just tired? Martina Morger explores these questions on the basis of around twenty works from the collection – by artists including Edith Dekyndt, Latifa Echakhch, Christoph Getzner/Markus Getzner, Anne Marie Jehle, Marcel Odenbach, Gina Pane, Pamela Rosenkranz or Aleksandra Signer. One focus is on video works. Many of the works on show have not been exhibited for some time or are being showcased to the public for the first time. An installation- intervention by Morger herself consists of a large velvet curtain that swathes the topic in a soft, benevolent sheath.

“Always exhausting all of life’s options and always talking about exhausted life, human beings see themselves at the centre of everything”, as the curator critically observes. Her selection reflects the search for needs that we have stopped satisfying or that we find it almost impossible to satisfy, as she explains. “Time and again, the yearning for final farewells, fading memories, all but forgotten things, ensnares us in blissful nostalgia. While things discarded, things that arrived too late, things that are missing, believed dead or doomed to die encircle our present emotional state like vultures descending on their coveted carrion.”

A production of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, curated by Martina Morger.

Artists in the exhibition

Giovanni Anselmo, Edith Dekyndt, Latifa Echakhch, Jochen Gerz, Christoph Getzner & Markus Getzner, Leiko Ikemura, Anne Marie Jehle, Gemma Jones, Anna Kołodziejska, Matt Mullican, Bruce Nauman, Cady Noland, Marcel Odenbach, Gina Pane, Pamela Rosenkranz, Aleksandra Signer, Erik Steinbrecher, Nora Turato, Erich Weiss.