Utopia and Monument - Sabine Breitwieser

The publication documents and reflects upon the two-year exhibition project Utopia and Monument at the steirischer herbst 2009 and 2010 in Graz. Focusing on two special themes - "The Privatization of Public Sphere" (2009), and "Virtuosity and Public Sphere" (2010) - ten artworks each year, making a total of 20 new works (installed for the duration of the respective exhibition) were commissioned for Graz. As a point of departure, two concepts were provocatively presented for discussion that had disappeared from the debate on public space: "utopia" as a space of thought, and the "monument" as a space of memory. The book documents the Artist's works and discusses them by numerous contribution from renown authors.

Sabine Breitwieser Since October 2010 she is Chief Curator for Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is Secretary and Treasurer of CIMAM - the International Committee of ICOM (International Council of Museums) for Museums and Collections of Modern Art. From 1988 until 2007 she was the (Founding) Director and Curator of the Generali Foundation in Vienna for which she has built the institution, the program and an important collection published in the volumes Exhibitions 1989-2007 (2008) and in Occupying Space (2003). She has curated numerous projects and edited as many publications on artists such as Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Andrea Fraser, Mary Kelly, Edward Krasinski, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula. Her most important thematic projects are Designs for the Real World, double life, RE-PLAY, vivencias/life experience or White Cube/Black Box. Recent projects - additionally to Utopia and Monument for the steirischer herbst - are Modernologies presented at MACBA (2009) in Barcelona and at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2010), and Which Life?, in the frame of the "curatorial project" at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.