Goshka Macula at the New Museum

This exhibition will mark the first museum presentation in New York of the work of London-based artist and 2008 Turner Prize nominee Goshka Macuga (b. 1967, Warsaw, Poland). Macuga’s practice typically applies in-depth historical and archival research to an interest in the evolving relationships among artists, institutions, politics, and communities. Occupying the New Museum’s Second Floor galleries, the exhibition will bring together a selection of Macuga’s most significant projects from the past five years, including several of her large-scale tapestries, which “weave” people together in their reimagining of demonstrations, public assemblies, cultural events, and meetings of minds. For Of what is, that is; of what is not, that is not (2012), the artist’s commission for dOCUMENTA (13), Macuga presented two tapestries that were shown simultaneously in two separate locations: Kassel, Germany, and Kabul, Afghanistan. The two black-and-white panels, with their composite stitching-together of figures from disparate yet interlocking communities, illuminate the elusive relationship between historic documentation and truth. In Preparatory Notes for a Chicago Comedy (2014) Macuga expands on the function of demonstration and performance in her tapestries, presenting a stage set for a production based on an unpublished play by eccentric German art historian Aby Warburg. As with many of Macuga’s projects, this piece explores the complicated and oftentimes fraught relationship between art and society throughout history that continues to resonate in the present. The exhibition is curated by Margot Norton, Associate Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director.