Zinny/Maidagán
Museum für Moderne Kunst – MMK Zollamt Frankfurt
Dolores Zinny (Rosario, Argentina, 1968) and Juan Maidagán (Rosario, Argentina, 1957) have been invited to explore Zollamt, the project room in which Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Art develops the proposals of innova- tive artists in order to make their work known in Germany. For some years now, they have been a familiar presence in the German art scene due to the fact that they reside in that country and work with some of the mainstream local gal- leries.
On this occasion, the Argentine couple has explored the possibilities of the old custom house building in Frankfurt, on the Main, and has found in the year of its construction, 1927, the conducting thread for their artistic intervention. “Compartement” is a group of collages, mod- els and sculptures inspired by events that occurred during that year or in the decade of 1920, posing through spatial integration a critical reflection on architecture as a politi- cal and psychological element. The elements that comprise the exhibition draw upon the formal language of mod- ernism, and partly upon that of conceptual art, and incor- porate into it literary and scientific references, circum- scribed in this case to the 1920s. Thus, mention is made, among other events, of the first exhibition of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or to the emergence of the “New Frankfurt” as an innovative element in the new conception of urban planning and welfare housing. In addition, they incorporate in their proposal different references to their previous works with curtains, with which they participated in the Gwangju Biennial (South Korea), and which maintain their link with the space, architecture and its forms.
