Detail: Scenes of conflict and antagonism, scenes of disagreement and discord are motifs for the opening exhibition of the Burger Collection. With this premise, 'Conflicting Tales' engages with subjectivity, not an interior view, but an engagement with the field of tension that opens between the individual and society. Consciousness is posited as a problematic: how does the individual deal with societal ideas, rules, and models? Through what decisions does the individual arrive at the position that he or she ultimately takes vis-A-vis the others? When and why is the individual absorbed in society, and when does he or she resist the social outside? Selected works by more than 30 contemporary artists of the Burger Collection generate an environment in which these questions can be raised in an exemplary fashion. In so doing, art is not subjected to sociology, but becomes meaningful to the extent that it allows us to observe how subjectivity is formed, influenced, challenged, and perhaps generated within aesthetic processes or phenomena. This is grounded by the premise that aesthetic experience is particularly important wherever moral, political, or historical forces shape and form the site of subjectivity in ways that can only be traced out with difficulty.
A starting point for the exhibition 'Conflicting Tales' is the unstable and at the same time highly vital threshold between youth and adulthood, a point in life where social identity develops in difficult or at least interesting ways, also a point in time where more constant forms of physical and intellectual consciousness take shape. Antagonistic possibilities and attitudes of expectation mix with the problem of identity. One of the questions here is the role of the ego, whereby the staging of our own body in relation to the social surrounding and society as a whole is especially important. If this first question can be described as “what to do with our own body,” then the second question is rather, “How to set my body in relationship to society?”
With this, our attention shifts from the psychological and physical aspects toward symbolic and intellectual aspects that have an effect in this process and that remain of general importance beyond this threshold for individual biographies. It is now the environment, or rather, the political and historical dynamic of society that comes into view, in the form of codes, protocols, and contexts of knowledge, but also as a confusing reservoir of movements and impulses. But how does this have an impact upon the emergence of or change in subjectivity? The artists explore this realm by raising questions of communication that emerge between individuals and the media, political, and historical contexts, questions that are sometimes left incomplete, as an unsolvable contradiction, or in fact fail.
'Conflicting Tales' is the first of four planned exhibitions from the holdings of the Burger Collection, which currently includes around 1000 works, that will focus generally on the issue of subjectivity. Three further exhibitions in coming years will probe the issues of narration, historicity, and language as they play out in the Burger Collection. The concept for the presentation of the Burger Collection foresees changing sites of presentation around the world for the exhibitions. The purpose of these temporary exhibitions is an open engagement with the collection concept, in which various models of exhibition, presentation, and outreach are investigated.