BERLIN.- In addition to the exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Projects 1963-2020 (which runs through August 17), the PalaisPopulaire is showing Time Present from June 10, 2020, to February 8, 2021. The exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of international photographic art from the Deutsche Bank Collection. After showing works on paper from the Deutsche Bank Collection at its opening, Time Present is now dedicated to photography. This part of the collection comprises over 5,000 works, covering nearly all the techniques, formats, and themes of contemporary photography.

With Time Present Deutsche Bank, in cooperation with IBM, is breaking new ground in art education. For the first time, the intelligent assistant MIA is available for visitors to engage in dialog on a broader scale. The PalaisPopulaire is the first institution in Europe to use MIA artificial intelligence for art education. MIA stands for “Museum Intelligent Assistant” and is based on cloud-based IBM Watson technology. After a pilot phase, MIS is now integrated into the museum’s own app and provides background information on nine photographs via chat. MIA answers visitors’ questions in real time.

Time Present offers insights into over four decades of collecting history, with over 60 works by prominent artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, as well as representatives of global contemporary art, including Kader Attia, Yto Barrada, Mohamed Camara, and Amalia Ulman.

The spectrum of Time Present ranges from “classics” of the Düsseldorf School, which were already collected in the 1980s and early 1990s, to works that reflect the collection’s current global orientation with a focus on China, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, the USA, and several African countries. Dispensing with a chronological presentation, the exhibition examines how artists have devoted themselves to the theme of “time” since the 1970s.

With this focus, the show also refers to the 40th anniversary of the corporate collection, which coincides with the 150th anniversary of Deutsche Bank. A technical, conceptual, formal, and phenomenological examination of time, as well as links between photography, time, and contemporary events, form the thematic framework: What different levels of reality and time does a photograph capture? Is what we see in a photo present or past, reality or imagination? Time Present documents how photography, in conjunction with performance, film, conceptual art, media theory, and politics, has reoriented itself as an artistic medium. At the same time, there are repeated references to painting and art history.

Artists featured in the exhibition
Shirin Aliabadi, Kader Attia, Yto Barrada, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Zohra Bensemra, Mohamed Camara, Cao Fei, Susan Derges, Samuel Fosso, Andrea Galvani, Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, Andreas Gursky, Siobhán Hapaska, Mathilde ter Heijne, Candida Höfer, Ottmar Hörl, Axel Hütte, Idris Khan, Martin Liebscher, Julio César Morales, Andreas Mühe, Roman Ondak, Adrian Paci, Sigmar Polke, Jo Ractliffe, Gerhard Richter, Anri Sala, Viviane Sassen, Gregor Schneider, Tokihiro Sato, Anett Stuth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Amalia Ulman, Wim Wenders, Miwa Yanagi, Zhu Jia

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with text contributions by David Campany and Friedhelm Hütte and four artist interviews, conducted by Eddy Frankel, Oliver Koerner von Gustorf, Michket Krifa, and Mariko Takeuchi (Kerber Verlag Photo, gatefold brochure, English/German, 212 pages, 114 illustrations in color, ISBN 978-3-7356-0649-5, € 29).