État des Lieux #3
Österreichische Exilregierung et d’autres documents

ÉTAT DES LIEUX
To mark our tenth anniversary in the year 2000 and everyone’s entry into the Third Millennium, we decided to give the Centre of contemporary art an even greater opening. The outcome is a special program called État des lieux, aiming to set up an inventory of the various aspects of current art.

Going against established practice, we decided to invite guest curators and ask them to take stock of what is happening in art now, with a view to describing the present and outlining the future. The project broke down into four events-exhibitions – four inventories – spread out over the entire year.

These État des lieux, events or exhibitions circumscribed in space and time, bring together artists in the broad meaning of the term, who focus on the concerns of the guest curators. Their job is to establish lines of communication between the various forms of thought for which art is the medium. Each of these presentations is a statement by the curator, expressive of his or her convictions.

ÖSTERREICHISCHE EXILREGIERUNG ET D’AUTRES DOCUMENTS – ROBERT FLECK
This is not a political exhibition. I consider the invited artists to be among the most promising of the many young talents I met in Vienna over the last years. Today, Austrian artists are less in need of new political declarations (important as these may be, and important as it is to uphold the ones that have been made to date) than of opportunities to show their work abroad, thus ensuring a greater measure of autonomy within their own country. The particularly heterogeneous group shown here bears witness to an extreme diversity and wealth of artistic expression on the Vienna scene in the 90s, born of an impressive creative effervescence often revolving around electronic music and the new autonomous structures it generated.