Robert Filliou, Wanting Peace Preparing for Peace, 1985, Courtesy Edition Block
Thursday, 5 October 2017, 6:30 pm
IS PEACE BORING?
In memory of Robert Filliou (1926 – 1987)
Anders Kreuger (curator, M HKA, Antwerp) presents “one of the most important artists of the 20th century”
Event in English language
Robert Filliou belongs to the influential figures of contemporary art history. Nevertheless, he is mentioned in the same breath as the leading lights of the 20th century only rarely. With his oeuvre, he left important traces – also in Hamburg, where he worked as a visiting professor at the Hamburg art academy HFBK at the beginning of the 1980s. Who was this globetrotter, who spoke various languages, embraced life, turned art inside out, and worked towards peace?
A trained economist, French-born Robert Filliou had a very different background and was a freethinker who is often mentioned in connection to the Fluxus movement but himself liked to evade any categorization. In his daily reality, life, philosophy, community, and art merged into one another. With many of his ideas, concepts, and projects, he playfully developed utopian models, presenting an alternative social reality in the sense of solidarity, diversity, and freedom.
More than 30 years ago, Filliou came up with the idea of an Art-of-Peace Biennale. This ambitious project was realized in cooperation with the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the Kunsthaus Hamburg. On the occasion of the 200-year anniversary of the Kunstverein, we are looking back at Robert Filliou and his project with this event and a presentation of historical documents.
The curator and author Anders Kreuger is going to introduce the exceptional artist Robert Filliou. Last year, Kreuger curated the large survey exhibition of Filliou’s works at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA). According to him, more radical, more fundamentally provocative, but also subtler and gentler than most of his contemporaries and peers, Filliou should be a household name for a large audience. […] Filliou is not just one of the most influential artists of the recent past. He is a voice for our time with important political, social, and theoretical visions for art.
Anders Kreuger (born in 1965) is Senior Curator at M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, one of the core members of L’Internationale, a European museum confederation that also includes MACBA in Barcelona and Reina Sofía in Madrid, Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, SALT in Istanbul and Ankara and Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. At M HKA, he has curated solo exhibitions by Jimmie Durham (2012), Aslan Gaisumov (2016) and Robert Filliou (2016), as well as group exhibitions such as ‘The Welfare State’ (2015) or ‘A Temporary Futures Institute’ (2017, with Belgian futurist Dr Maya van Leemput).
In addition, Kreuger is one of the editors of the art journal Afterall, published in London, and a member of the board for Kohta, a new privately funded kunsthalle in Helsinki. He also works on an independent basis as curator, writer, editor and lecturer, regularly publishing longer essays in Afterall and reviews of books and exhibitions on web resources such as art-agenda.com or kunstkritikk.com.
In 2006–2011, Kreuger was Exhibitions Curator at Lunds konsthall and in 2007–2010 he was Director of the Malmö Art Academy, both in his native Sweden. In 2007–2010, he was a member of the Programme Team for the European Kunsthalle in Cologne. In 1995–1999, he was Director of the Nordic Arts Centre and of NIFCA, the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, both in Helsinki.