BREGENZ.- The journal springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst published in Vienna addresses a heterogeneous audience with interests ranging from contemporary culture to general pop-cultural topics. The journal and KUB Arena thus share much common ground both in respect of subject matter and in terms of their target audiences.

While the production, presentation, and distribution of the journal’s contents take place in the form of text and image, in an exhibition it is the exhibits that are crucial. But since theoretical, social, and interdisciplinary issues are so central to the KUB program, styles of presentation are often close to the discursive form of a journal. The collaboration between springerin and KUB Arena explores what specific spaces they each create and how these are used. Can a journal be translated into an exhibition space and can the topics and methods dealt with and used in an exhibition be translated into journal format without just illustrating or simplifying the subjects?

The concept of value in its various senses lies at the heart of this joint project. “Value change,” “decline in values,” and the like, are common ideas nowadays. At the same time, material goods and increasingly all-embracing individualistic values seem to be becoming more important than ever. How is this reflected in the field of art? What new positions, erosions, and breaks with the past have occurred in the last 10 to 15 years? What visible factors pertaining to value and validity have established themselves in conjunction with what more or less valid articulable factors? What ideas of value, transient or enduring, are inscribed in such different art-related formats as exhibitions, works, discourse, or media like journals and magazines? Further lines of inquiry explore the extent to which “criticality” – whether in the medium of the exhibition or the journal – represents abiding values and what temporal and/or contextual constraints they are subject to.

As part of the springerin and KUB Arena cooperation a project-oriented presentation has been developed on the ground floor of the Kunsthaus Bregenz accompanying the production of the journal’s spring 2012 number. Central here are questions as to the durability and “shelf-life” of art and cultural appreciation and the different productive and distributive modes of exhibitions and magazines. Apart from the issue of the journal appearing along with the cooperation, a complete display of all springerin publications is on show in the KUB Arena. A jointly planned program of events accompany the project.

With Yto Barrada, Alice Creischer, Josef Dabernig, Katrina Daschner, Andreas Fogarasi, Claire Fontaine, Sanja Ivekovic, Julius Koller, Jiri Kovanda, Dorit Margreiter, Ulrike Müller, Andreas Pawlik, Mathias Poledna, Florian Pumhösl, Walid Raad, Jochen Schmith, Andreas Siekmann, Mladen Stilinovic, Kamen Stoyanov, Milica Tomic and an exhibtion architecture by Johannes Porsch