18 April 2016

Hans Hollein's 'Mobile Office' at the exhibition 'Poetics of Change' at Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Examples of proposals for alternative futures are in the focus of the exhibition 'Poetics of Change' which is on view from 23 April until 9 October at Museum der Moderne in Salzburg. Austrian architect Hans Hollein's visionary work of the late 60ies, the 'Mobile Office' (image below) is one of the artworks which were selected by museum's director Sabine Breitwieser and lead curator of 'Poetics of Change' from the house's own collections with the main goal to explore artists' visionary views on social, cultural, and political change.

"The works we have selected show artists responding to processes of change, to modifications of the immediate environments of their daily lives and shifts that affect their own identities, but also to innovations in the history of art," explains Sabine Breitwieser and adds that some of them developed proposals for change with impact on an alternative future. Hans Hollein's 1960ies exploration of a futuristic world looks like a visionary preview of the daily environment we are living in today with mobile workplaces, computers, Internet. The 'Mobile Office' followed his 'Proposal for Expansion of the University of Vienna' (1966) - it wasn't the proposal for a building but a network faculty. The inflatable 'Mobile Office' (1969) can be unfold out of a suitcase and will be on show at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg.

fig.: Hans Hollein 'Mobiles Büro', 1969 (Mobile Office). Hans Hollein in the 'Mobile Office'; production photo of the TV-documentary 'Das österreichische Portrait' (The Austrian Portrait); produced by the ORF, Paulus Manker. Photo: © Generali Foundation Collection - permanent loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.

The exhibition's special project will be contributed by Hans Haacke. It's an ongoing social research project which started already in the 1960s. It centers around people's opinions, polls and how future is changed by free speech and even when it's anonymized like in a poll. Hans Haacke's latest work, the 'World Poll' (premiered at 2015 Venice Biennale, article) was revised especially for visitors of the exhibition in Salzburg and will allow guests - like in Venice - to express anonymously their opinion via iPads; it's announced that the results of the audience survey will be presented in weekly periods from the start of the exhibition 'Poetics of Change' on 23 April.


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