The Exhibition TELL IT TO MY HEART* began with a conversation around the artworks gifted, swapped & circulated, that constitute the personal collection of artist Julie Ault—a founding member of American art collaborative Group Material (1979-1996)—in 2013. Travelling with them for a year or so from Basel, to Lisbon & then back to NYC, where Julie lived with many of the works in her shared apartment with artist Martin Beck, those that initiated the process were necessarily joined by other voices.
As an exploration into differing models for telling the histories of art & artworks, compelling relations between the works were revealed as their contexts & stories were reinvigorated: some of them were written during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s & 90s amidst the social & political resistances in its wake & during the so-called culture wars, while others reach back to the 1960s.
The original premise of exhibiting Ault’s collection expanded as productive affinities & dissonances were recognised and still more works were gathered.
Contributing artists included, among others: Martin Beck, James Benning, Sadie Benning, Moyra Davey, Steven Evans, Tony Feher, Baylis Glascock, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Group Material, Jim Hodges, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Peter Hujar, Corita Kent, Heinz Peter Knes, Louise Lawler, Rasmus Røhling, Tim Rollins + K.O.S., Jason Simon, Nancy Spero, Paul Thek, Wolfgang TIllmans, Danh Vo, Carrie May Weaves & Martin Wong.
Opening a series of activities initiated by Klasse Bibby for the Summer Semester, artists Martin Beck & Heinz Peter Knes, and curators Nikola Dietrich & Scott Cameron Weaver will join us in a conversation about their parts in TELL IT TO MY HEART.
The Conversation will be held in English.
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Martin Beck is an artist, exhibition maker, prolific publisher including Last Night, 2013–19, & long-time collaborator of Ault. A comprehensive solo exhibition of his work, rumors & murmurs, was shown at MUMOK Vienna in 2017.
Nikola Dietrich is a curator. She was director of contemporary art at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst when she invited TELL IT TO MY HEART into its rooms. As current director of the Kölnischer Kunstverein she most recently initiated the exhibition THE KÖLN CONCERT, by Dorothy Iannone & Juliette Blightman.
Heinz Peter Knes is an artist who’s photographs cataloguing the works in Ault & Becks' homes constitute the image component of TELL IT TO MY HEART Vol. 1. His solo exhibition Heinz Peter Knes: Fotografische Arbeit, is currently installed at Künstlerhaus Bremen & is viewable online.
Scott Cameron Weaver was curator at Kunstmuseum Basel at the time of TELL IT TO MY HEART, and with each of these invited guests, was a core member of the exhibition & editorial team. He inaugurated the gallery O-Town House, L.A. in 2019, where the exhibition Pathologically Social is now on view.
* The title of the exhibition takes its name from an artwork by Stevan Evans, titled MACHO MAN, TELL IT MY HEART, (1989). The third iteration of the exhibition at Artists Space in NYC, completed the gesture & took the entire title of the work as its own.