Site Visit
24 Mar–23 Jul 2017

A site visit is usually part of an exhibition planning: An artist visits a location regarding a prospective exhibition. Based on this ritual the Kunstverein Freiburg invites guests and combines this with shifts of certain time and space parameters of its exhibition programmes. It is less a format of an inventory more of a futures draft: It asks what could be, and focuses on potentialities of artistic practices and presentations from a future perspective.

At present our view into the future seems concealed. Instead of an opening to the unknown evaluated forecasts and techniques to manage the hereafter only seem to extend the presence. The format Site Visit evolves in the charged relationship of a seemingly eternal presence tending to disaster and an open, desirable future. Regarding the activities of the Kunstverein Freiburg, the future could be planned and organized by using the limited budget to use the hall in a proven manner for exhibitions and accompanying programmes. Even on the background of pragmatic considerations and Excel sheet arithmetics Site Visit is an experiment to break the routines and to reshape the facts by exploring possibilities.

Artists and other guests are invited whose works could be relevant for the activities of the Kunstverein Freiburg both for future exhibitions and regarding the possibilities of presenting and discussing art. One focus lies on artistic practices which include cooperation and self-organisation or are (re-)connecting their own conditions and modes of circulation. Like a site visit the invitation focuses on the future concerning something that could be realized by the Kunstverein Freiburg up to something seemingly totally utopian or fictitious. During their usually multi-day visit the guests receive an impression of the institution and its circumstances. At the same time the format allows the visitors and members of the Kunstverein to get to know the guests and to gain an impression of their work, issues and ideas.

The guests are asked to bring along something. It could be a work in progress, a prototype, an uncompleted or an in situ work. The contribution can but must not relate to the Kunstverein or an aspect of it, it could also be a free speculation on the future. Every visit is connected with an event in an open form: performance, conversation, excursion, lecture, hiking … Instead of realising an exhibition planned in advance with every visit, the events and materials can proliferate into the unknown.

Harm van den Dorpel develops a Website for Site Visit with online contributions of the individual guests. The artist duo It’s Our Playground creates the adaptable and extendible display unit Framework for the spatial presentation of the different contributions. During the life span of Site Visit the office of the Kunstverein will be transferred to the exhibition hall. Thereby the persons and the processes behind the planning of the exhibitions will become partly visible. Most importantly the visitors and the team of the Kunstverein team can come together in conversation. In this way the office that works on future projects after the opening of an exhibition will be relocated into the presence of the exhibition hall.

In collaboration with the Embassy of Canada: