The artist publication is published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Die Unterlagen befinden sich im Zustand der Ablage. Poetry and Administration from the Archive of the Künstlerverbund im Haus der Kunst e.V.’, Central Institute for Art History, Munich, 20 March — 4 July 2025
Participating artists: Albert Coers, Petra Gerschner, Esther Glück, Andreas Huber, Christoph Nicolaus and Rasha Ragab, Günter Nosch, Stefanie Unruh
The Künstlerverbund im Haus der Kunst e.V. is the successor to Ausstellungsleitung München e.V. [steering commitee], which was founded in 1948 and organised the major Munich art exhibitions and well over 100 special exhibitions at Haus der Kunst from 1949 to 2011.
Albert Coers (*1975) often works with language-related material and found objects. In ‘ab hier’ [from here] he explores the archive of the exhibition committee at Haus der Kunst photographically. He is particularly interested in labelling, classification systems and the deposits of time in the archive, also known as the ‘picture cellar’ by insiders. Everything that has to do with the decades of exhibitions at Haus der Kunst can be found there: catalogues, signs, room numbers, packaging material, photos of paintings, gloves, etc. Detached from their purpose-related context, the words and objects begin to take on a life of their own. ‘From here’ is written on a note on the shelf; it is no longer clear what this originally referred to, but it is a sign of the work of organising, locating and labelling, and can also refer to the beginning of the research and the exhibition for which the booklet is being published.
In the Central Institute, Coers is showing two large-format pictures of notes and labelling. In the accompanying small-format artist’s booklet, he associatively combines photographs from the archive, putting two images together on each double page. The year ‘1975’ appears again and again, creating a link to the artist. The eyelet stitching plays with the possibility of filing and archiving the booklet.