FRANKFURT.- William Forsythe (b. New York City, 1949) is considered an innovator of ballet who has influenced later generations of dancers to a degree matched by virtually no other. Having resigned from his position as artistic director of the Forsythe Company in the spring of 2015, he has meanwhile embarked on a new chapter in the development of his choreographic œuvre. On the occasion of this new artistic beginning, the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main is devoting a comprehensive survey to the internationally celebrated artist. “This exhibition launches a new phase in William Forsythe’s choreographic work and takes a programmatic look at the manifold relationships between choreography and the visual arts. It thus represents yet another instalment in our ongoing focus on the borderlands of contemporary art”, observes Dr Susanne Gaensheimer, director of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst.

Over the past decades, Forsythe has created an incomparable cosmos of dance: he has developed pioneering ballet choreographies, experimental dance pieces, digital dance scores and space-specific installations that unexpectedly turn the viewers into protagonists themselves.

William Forsythe’s œuvre has been associated with the city of Frankfurt am Main for thirty years. It was here that he founded the Ballett Frankfurt in 1984 and The Forsythe Company in 2004. He has received numerous internationally well-known dance awards and in 2010 was honoured with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale.

Forsythe’s room-filling installations form the core of the exhibition. The interactive video wall City of Abstracts (2000) in the MMK’s central hall involves the visitors even before they have entered the exhibition space. Through trial and error they quickly figure out how they can control their morphed mirror images on the video wall. The result is an unforeseen choreography brought about by curiosity rather than intent. In another room, swinging pendula navigate the visitors through the installation Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time (2015); in The Fact of Matter (2009), on the other hand, an obstacle course made of rings, the visitors are instructed to cross the room without touching the floor. The installation A Volume in Which It Is Not Possible for Certain Actions to Arise (2015) can cause a feeling of constriction: now the visitor is called upon to cross a space only 70 centimetres in height. In addition to further room installations such as Additive Inverse (2007) or the new production Aufwand (2015), a number of video installations are also on view, for example Stellenstellen Films, produced in 2013 in cooperation with the MMK, the film Lectures from Improvisation Technologies (1994), and the meanwhile legendary Solo (1997).

A characteristic shared by all of the William Forsythe works on display is the organization of movement. The choreographic objects allow the visitors to become active themselves by responding physically to the installations.
“This show is a performative exhibition with a choreographic arrangement – a kind of score through which the public can move freely. The result is a temporary ‘museum in motion’. The visitors themselves become protagonists who interact with William Forsythe’s installation works”, explains Dr Mario Kramer, exhibition curator and head of the collection.

In this exhibition, Forsythe’s performative and space-related Choreographic Objects enter into dialogue with the museum architecture by Hans Hollein, but also with masterpieces from the MMK collection by Florian Hecker, On Kawara, Teresa Margolles, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Santiago Sierra, Andreas Slominski, Rosemarie Trockel, James Turrell, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and many others. The latter were selected in close collaboration with William Forsythe according to content-related correspondences as well as formal analogies. Line, movement, sound, compositional structures and aspects of performance in space play a key role in all of these works.

Following solo presentations at the Lipsiusbau in Dresden in 2014, the Folkwang Museum in Essen in 2013, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus in 2009, the Tate Modern in London the same year and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in 2006, this is the first museum exhibition to present the œuvre of William Forsythe in all its facets along with opera magna of the past twenty years.