LUXEMBOURG.- Casino Luxembourg—Forum d’art contemporain presents the multimedia exhibition My Last Will. On the initiative of the German-Luxembourg artist duo M+M (Marc Weis and Martin De Mattia), 32 international artists and artist groups explore the question “What remains?”.
The result is an impressive exhibition course, in which a multitude of recently created works can be experienced, including five space-consuming film and sound installations commissioned specifically for the exhibition. In the individual examination of their own legacy, it becomes apparent how multifaceted contemporary artists reflect on and critically question the significance of their own creative work. They try to get to the core of what constitutes their artistic goal or their personal interest. They explore the presumed relevance of their work for a future that they will not experience themselves and whose standards of value are still completely unknown to them.
Some artists engage radically with their family environment and its heritage, like Erik van Lieshout in a dispute with his father, or the Italian artist group MASBEDO in their filmic meditation on the skin of their mothers. The twin sisters L.A. Raeven create a lifelike robot doll Annelies, which bears traits of both artists. When one sister dies, Annelies remains as a comforting replacement for the other.
Other artists reflect on themselves and their own work, like Keren Cytter in her filmic essay with a male alter ego or Raphaela Vogel in her fetishlike poster archive made of animal skins. Tobias Zielony looks back in a photo essay on intense moments since his childhood. In her painting Cosmic Prayers, Portia Zvavahera sets a sign of collective cohesion. Other positions develop unusual methods for preserving nature or political engagement. PPKK (Schönfeld & Scoufaras), for example, compose an archaic-seeming song that warns of contaminated final repositories even in the distant future. Lara Almarcegui acquires mining rights to prevent mining in untouched nature by companies. The Colombian artist Iván Argote imagines a future without the legacy of colonial monuments. In an AI-supported portrait series, Mohamed Bourouissa questions the image of the black activist Assa Traoré in social media.
Some artists, however, focus their attention completely on the here and now according to their philosophical tradition and thus fundamentally question the significance of a future legacy. These positions include the Buddhist-influenced Su-Mei Tse, Mire Lee, or Su Hui-Yu, who has created a powerful film installation, but also the sensual anarchist Carlos Amorales.
Eventually, death itself appears as a topic in the exhibition, as in Agnieszka Polska’s picture story or Santiago Sierra’s Death Counter. On its huge display at the entrance of Casino Luxembourg, the worldwide death numbers are stoically counted during the duration of the exhibition.
In the context of the exhibition, the lecture performance “Dying on Stage” by Christodoulos Panayiotou has been performed at the Théâtre National du Luxembourg. With it, Panayiotou explores the difficult relationship between death and theatre and asks the question of how dying can be portrayed on stage.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the artist book My Last Will has been published by Franz and Walther König. All texts, drawings, photographs, and collages of the participating artists are summarised like in an anthology.
After their monographic exhibition 7 Tage [7 Days] in 2015, M+M return to Casino Luxembourg and present My Last Will, a curatorial project that is as sensitive as it is ambitious.
Participating artists: Loukia Alavanou, Lara Almarcegui, Carlos Amorales, Iván Argote, John Bock, Mohamed Bourouissa, Olaf Breuning, Chicks on Speed, Clément Cogitore, Keren Cytter, Marcel Dzama, Hanakam & Schuller, Su Hui-Yu, Mire Lee, Erik van Lieshout, Renzo Martens, MASBEDO, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Cesare Pietroiusti, Agnieszka Polska, PPKK (Schönfeld & Scoufaras), L.A. Raeven, Ricarda Roggan, Santiago Sierra, Shelly Silver, Su-Mei Tse, Raphaela Vogel, Simon Wachsmuth, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Tobias Zielony, Thomas Zipp, and Portia Zvavahera.
