Opening: March 15, 2025, 7 p.m.
Duration: March 16 until April 27, 2025
Discussion: Tba.

Greeting: Sylvia Stille (Treasurer NAK)
Introduction: Maurice Funken (Director NAK)

NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein is pleased to present the exhibition TWODO Collection: 2000-2024. This marks the conclusion of the TWODO project after 24 years, and in the retrospective we take the opportunity to look back at the outstanding projects and exhibitions by Mel Chin/GALA Committee, Fareed Armaly, Daniel Roth, Johannes Wohnseifer, Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Michael Stevenson, Simon Dybbroe Moller, Jonathan Monk, Nina Canell, Jan Timme, Klaus Merkel, Craig Mulholland, Lone Haugaard Madsen, Manuel Graf, Michael E. Smith, Kathrin Sonntag, Hiroki Tsukuda, Nora Turato, Markus Saile, Kate Davis and Arthur Löwen. The exhibition opens on March 15, 2025.

NAK’s patrons’ and collectors’ group was founded in 1999 and is still a unique international model of private art involvement, breaking new ground in terms of both collecting and patronage. The TWODO Collection has not only provided a platform for unusual artistic projects, but has also secured part of the Kunstverein’s production budget every year since its inception, providing substantial financial support for the Kunstverein.

At the same time, TWODO was a genuinely new and unusual project of collecting activity. The aim of the group was to build up a joint collection of contemporary art that focused on the idea of preservation and active participation in a larger artistic idea. Collecting was thus understood as an activity that did not only involve the individual purchase of art. To a certain extent, the exhibition examines the scope to which this intention was achieved.

The TWODO Collection was initiated and conceived by collector Wilhelm Schürmann back in 1998. It ideally consisted of 24 people, which also explains the name, as TWODO stands for two dozen. TWODO always engaged in committed communication with the artists invited by the group independently of the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, who – ideally – realized a project once a year.

The works of the participating artists should particularly reflect the interactive structure of the group and make it possible for each TWODO member to take possession of a part of the project privately, but at the same time be aware of the overall work to which they belong. In the best case, individual works are distributed among the collectors, but can be reassembled if necessary. The aim of the exhibition is a comprehensive, albeit incomplete, review of 24 years of cooperative exhibition activity between NAK and TWODO, which takes into account all projects and also documents them in parallel.

To mark the occasion, the Kunstverein is bringing together a large number of outstanding works from the history of the TWODO Collection, which have been kindly loaned to the Kunstverein by the collectors.

The TWODO Collection’s initial project was the acquisition of a large group of works from a charity auction in 1998. Mel Chin & GALA Committee had equipped the US television series Melrose Place with subversive props over an extended period of time, which could be read as a commentary on society as well as the TV and entertainment industry. The prime time TV program was thus discovered as the ideal place for an artistic intervention. Mel Chin’s leitmotif was the idea of a virus that intervenes virally, i.e. in a media-critical, political and social way, in an existing system and then spreads from there – in this case wherever Melrose Place was broadcast – and thus ultimately became globally perceptible. When the subversive works were finally to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in Beverly Hills after the end of the series, the idea was born to buy several works in the group in order to keep some of the works together. These were presented in the exhibition Vorabendprogramm in Aachen in 2000.

The subsequent TWODO project by Fareed Armaly used the Melrose Place Bar, which was purchased at the auction and presented as a loan from the TWODO Collection at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, as the location for the Melrose Plays video series. Each TWODO member determined a special prop, object or plot element as a product placement, which was included in a designed script.

The following year, Daniel Roth realized Zeitpassagen Dr. Dräcker – in den Höhlen des schwarzen Staubes, a multidisciplinary exhibition for the TWODO Collection, which traced the mysterious existence of the ministerial director Edmund F. Dräcker in German diplomatic and media history. Roth created drawings, sculptures and objects that create traces of the diplomat’s presence in the respective domestic contexts – be it on walls, shelves, cupboards or broken table surfaces.

The network-like counterpart of a group of collectors is a meaningful point of reference for the work what has bilderberg twodo with black helicopter? by Johannes Wohnseifer, created in 2002. His concept is based on conspiratorial structures in politics and society, the phenomena of secret societies and conspiracy theories. His complex of works is determined by the so-called Bilderberg Conferences, informal, private meetings of influential people from politics, business, the aristocracy, the military, black helicopters and other nebulous phenomena of global reality, constructed from a playground landscape with a tower, ramp, slide and suspension bridge as well as spatial objects, paintings and collages.

The work of the artist Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven stands for an early multimedia approach in contemporary art, which, against the background of scientific theories, is composed of synthetic formal inventions of always subjective visualizations determined by contours, compositions and colors and was shown at the NAK in 2004 under the title How reliable is the brain?

In an artistic way in The Gift. The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, Michael Stevenson tells the story of the Australian artist Ian Fairweather. He wanted to see his newly acquired paintings at the Tate Britain and decided to travel to Great Britain by raft. However, as a completely inexperienced sailor, Fairweather ran aground and was eventually rescued by the indigenous people of the Indonesian island of Roti, who then dismantled his raft to make objects for everyday domestic use. Stevenson’s The Gift visualizes an experience of exchange, gifts, offerings and counter-offerings outside of a common market economy and transfers these ideas to the art market as well as collecting.

The different possibilities of perception and presentation – seeing, showing, reading – alluded to in the title The view, the show, the word and the architect of Simon Dybbroe Møller’s exhibition reflected the variety of materials and media used by the artist, who very often deals with modernist phenomena in his works, for his exhibition, some of which were created together with the TWODO group or referred to individual members of the collectors’ community.

The twenty-four piece steel puzzle by artist Jonathan Monk forms a closed rectangle when put together, in the tradition of Carl André. Each TWODO member owns at least one piece of the puzzle, just as the artist himself owns one piece to this day. Putting the work together is therefore only possible in a joint meeting. The collectors’ group and the artist remain connected through the work created even after The Puzzle project.

Both a sculptural intervention and a collective experience, the work Black Light (for Ten Performers) by artist Nina Canell materialized through the interconnection of ten synchronized light blackouts in the geographically dispersed apartments of TWODO members. Over a period of twelve months, each blackout was triggered by the artist at irregular intervals.

One second in the film is made up of 24 individual frames – the second chosen by Jan Timme from L’argent by Robert Bresson from 1983 shows how banknotes, including a counterfeit banknote, change hands. With Eine Sekunde, Jan Timme set in motion a complex process of buying, raffling and exchanging film stills and frames for the TWODO Collection in 2009, testing the mechanisms of the market and capitalism and deliberately expanding the scope for action through the principle of chance.

For the Stacks project, the painter Klaus Merkel invites TWODO collectors to select different motifs – at least 2, maximum 10 – from his inventory catalog, which indexes his own oeuvre. The chosen combination of motifs as well as the background color, which is also decided by the future owner of the work, is painted again by him and combined in his so-called stacks. Merkel takes a retrospective look at his work, bundling, revising and updating it, while at the same time reflecting the individual decisions of the owner of the painting.

With Illegitmi non carborundum, Craig Mulholland pursued his ongoing research into the role of media and information technologies in post-industrial capitalism. The installation, consisting of over 30 elements, represented a kind of classroom situation with benches and blackboards. The fragile, reworked surfaces of the individual table elements bear various markings.

In 2012, Lone Haugaard Madsen realized fragile or even bizarre objects with Raum#314 to create a network of set pieces, resulting in a spatial choreography in the exhibition context. The artist’s works consist primarily of everyday materials and remnants of an artistic production process, whereby the resulting work arises from this production process and questions it at the same time, with random remnants appearing as protagonists. The parameters of art production are negotiated by reflecting on both her own position as an artist and that of the recipient. Lone Haugaard Madsen refers equally to the production conditions on site and in the studio, as well as to the creation of the exhibition in the institutional space.

Manuel Graf presented parts of his Doppelgaenger series of works as the next TWODO project after a one-year break. Graf created an anecdotal fusion between online and offline worlds by extending the characteristics of the collectors’ personal objects into the virtual realm by combining them with flatscreen monitors. Graf’s work thus not only impressively reflected the interactive principle of the collectors’ group, but at the same time the corpus of works on display implicitly stood for a unique model of support within the German Kunstvereine based on private commitment to art.

In 2015, US artist Michael E. Smith realized an untitled project for the TWODO Collection, which was shown in a week-long presentation at NAK towards the end of the year. The multi-part sculptural installation consisted of individual benches covered with various colored and patterned baby rompers, simulating a figurative, individual character, but referring to a materialism of basic needs, which in turn is shown in an arrangement of destroyed bodies.

The series 24 Halbwahrheiten by artist Kathrin Sonntag corresponds to the concept of the TWODO Collection: the whole is more than the sum of its parts and formulates the idea of a dialog and transfer between the depicted studio space and the exhibition space. In her works, Kathrin Sonntag condensed the time and space of two places via integrated mirror surfaces, while at the same time deconstructing the studio space in detail and rearranging it in ever new constellations.

His exhibition at NAK in the previous year was followed in 2018 by an untitled TWODO project by Hiroki Tsukuda. Tsukuda is a kind of visual archaeologist: layer by layer, the artist uncovers his own imaginary visual worlds in his works. These initially exist only in Tsukuda’s imagination, but are then assembled using digital technology and put on paper in ink and charcoal. For TWODO, Tsukuda varied stylistic elements and formats to create a coherent, architecturally complex pictorial landscape, spread over several individual works.

Titled retail like it’s 1991, Nora Turato presented a multi-part work that can be seen as a preliminary study for her catalog series Pool. The works of the TWODO members are thus large-format proofs of the later book pages, all printed on different types of paper, but, in contrast to the later publication, provided on the front and back with unique, ironically commenting slogans by the artist, taken from her performances.

The TWODO project separate | related by artist Markus Saile refers in several ways to the theme of relational hanging, which Saile has been exploring for some time. The terms separate and related describe two different ways in which elements within a picture as well as pictures on the wall and between walls in the room can relate to each other. The apparent contrast between separate and related, which is hinted at in the title, proves itself to be a necessary condition of a relationship in which new constellations can constantly form from individual works. Saile’s first presentation of the project was prevented by a fire at the Kunstverein and works were irretrievably destroyed; a second presentation followed in fall 2020, this time with new works. In this respect, the title of the project can also be applied to both exhibitions and the works shown in them: separate | related.

Kate Davis made a series of drawings the focus of her TWODO project. All entitled Flaw, the drawings show the everyday dust and dirt in the artist’s home down to the smallest detail. In English, flaw can mean mistake or imperfection, and pronounced it sounds like floor - the terrain explored for these drawings. All the works have a common interest in questions of value, feminist economics and the position of art-making in relation to other forms of work.

In 2022, NAK exhibited the TWODO project ˈKOUN(T)ƏRˌPOINT by Arthur Löwen alongside Davis. Arthur Löwen’s paintings go through various phases in the creation process, which always address the production of painting as a formation. Löwen has thus developed an individual painterly setting that both drives his artistic practice forward and is able to limit it in a productive way. The artist continues the constant repetition of the procedure in variations, thus providing a technical framework for his artistic exploration, which also served as the framework for the TWODO presentation.

The exhibition TWODO Collection: 2000-2024 is not intended as a comprehensive and conclusive presentation of the rich history of the TWODO collectors’ group, but rather as an invitation to explore the concept of collecting together; nevertheless, the exhibition is intended as a tribute to this unique idea and as a thank you to the many years of support that the collectors have given to the Kunstverein.

NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein hopes that the current presentation can serve as an occasion for a discussion on current and future concepts and models of collecting and patronage. For this reason, NAK will also be hosting a discussion round in April as part of the exhibition, which will be organized jointly with the Very Contemporary network and will thematically address these topics and also look back on the history of the TWODO Collection. Please check our homepage and social media for the exact date and participants.

 

With the kind support of and sincere gratitude to:

 

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