DRESDEN.- In 2014 the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden (HfBK) is celebrating the 250th anniversary of its foundation. To mark the occasion Mark Dion, the artist of international renown, is carrying out his first project in Dresden, at the invitation of the Art Academy.

For his biggest personal show in Germany to date, Mark Dion (*1961, USA) has drawn his inspiration from things hidden away in the collections of the Dresden Art Academy and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. The broad oeuvre of this documenta artist ranges from drawings and prints via videos, photographic essays, sculpture, installations and dioramas to full-blown expeditions. Mark Dion works with museums and collections all over the world, using his artistic practice to challenge the claim these authorities make to sole sovereignty in the interpretation of knowledge.

In Dresden too, Dion has trawled the depots and archives of illustrious institutions, questioning the systems they traditionally apply to ordering the objects from all around the world which they collect and display. In the process the artist has transformed apparently rigid classifications and triggered debate about the historical context of collections by rearranging their holdings in his complex installations. Following his expeditions into otherwise hidden storehouses, the Academy’s own exhibition space, the Octagon – has been transformed into an Academy of Things, where a fresh look has been taken at the institutional treasures. In cooperation with the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden Mark Dion amplifies his exhibition in two „satellits“ in the Green Vault and the Albertinum.

For Mark Dion, himself a passionate collector of all sorts of things, the collection at Dresden Art Academy, which boasts an almost encyclopaedic diversity, is a copious source of material. The HfBK’s picture collection with over 1500 items – including valuable paintings by artists such as Casanova, Kügelgen and Matthäi, and tens of thousands of studies – represents the artistic output of more than 250 years.

Academy of Things: The Temporary Art Gallery
A temporary pinacotheca for these works has been set up in the Academy’s Octagon. Interest focus on the multifarious artefacts used for teaching art – plaster casts, glass slides, pigments and X-rays, for example. The highlights among these educational aids are the unique anatomical models and preserved specimens of human and animal origin. The Art Academy in Dresden has the biggest and most comprehensive anatomical teaching collection in Germany with more than 500 objects. Mark Dion has made this collection and its ideological implications the focus of his project and will be inviting discussion about these models, which in the past have not all been accessible to the public. With his interdisciplinary approach, the artist exposes the stories behind such exhibits, but also the losses incurred by wars or teaching reforms. Amid the fieldwork with all its institutional and ideological critique, and the attention it draws to the sometimes quite wayward meanings of things, the Art Academy emerges as a place of artistic activity and as a vector of ideas for exhibition formats that are neither conventional nor typical of the museum ethos.

New Curiosities for the Green Vault
Two satellites to this project pursue their own, different approaches to museum objects and the histories and orders attached to them. For the Historical and New Green Vault – Dresden’s spectacular treasure chamber reopened only a few years ago – Dion revives the notion of the cabinet of curiosities. New objects appear among the historical staging of the permanent palatial display. With these New Curiosities for the Green Vault, the things of everyday life take their place within the princely cabinet of curiosities, prompting us to ask whether wonder and amazement are appropriate categories anymore as we reflect upon the material culture of an industrialised world.

Wild Animal Salon
At the Albertinum, the home of the Gallery of New Masters and the Sculpture Collection, Mark Dion has created a Wild Animal Salon, a stock-taking exercise which takes note of the collection’s paintings of wild animals from the Early Modern period until the 20th century. Through his practice, the artist maintains a running commentary on the 19th century and the way it ordered things. Consequently this extraordinary salon is dedicated not to the genres regarded back then as particularly respectable, such as portraits and historical scenes, but to depictions of animals, a genre long marginalised by academic discourse. By selecting these the artist questions the way museums formulate categories, making it clear that the relationship between humans and animals, between culture and nature – environmental issues, one might say – has always been subject to negotiation in curatorial and artistic practice.

The artistic experiments at the Octagon (HfBK Dresden) and the two satellits the Green Vault and the Albertinum (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden) are designed to test new lines of access for handling exhibits in the future. How can we make the histories of things visible? What is the status of damaged or ruined objects? How might these things conceivably be ordered in new ways? And what role does the material culture of past centuries play in present-day teaching?

Objects and venues are inextricably linked in the contemporary art system. Items in collections no longer serve, however, to confirm what we already know, but to open up new fields of potential. For Mark Dion’s “Academy of Things”, the rooms of the participating institutions have been transformed and the stories of objects are being told anew from an artistic perspective.

Mark Dion’s show will be accompanied by a book and an artist’s edition, due to appear in late 2014 / early 2015.

Mark Dion was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1961 and lives in New York. He heads the alternative art school Mildred’s Lane, Pennsylvania, and has had personal exhibitions in prestigious museums such as the Tate Britain (2000), MoMA (2004), Miami Art Museum (2006), Kunsthalle Krems (2009) and the Musée Océanographique (2011). Dion has participated in many collective shows, including Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997), the Bienniale of Sydney (2008) and documenta 13 in Kassel (2012). He has presented his findings in contextually responsive installations for museums with formats ranging from the fairground to the documentary archive. Mark Dion is an artist and an enthusiastic naturalist and collector who is constantly uncovering new curiosities and fascinating items that reflect the epistemological systems of the past, present, and future. His complex installations are also inspired by a playful scepticism towards institutional authority. This artistic strategy makes him a leading proponent of Institutional Critique.