Goshka Macuga

Anti-Collage (Anda Rottenberg)

She works with archival materials she finds in libraries and museums. Her work often begins with the history of the sites in which she is working, researching the collections of the institutions she works with, the work of artists she is interested in. Sometimes she recreates works by other artists, blurring the boundaries between artist and curator. For example at the Kunsthalle Basel, she recreated a 1971 exhibition of sculptures by Robert Morris that took place at the Tate Gallery in London which was closed by Tate authorities after 4 days as a result of safety scares. Macuga’s recreation allowed the public to experience the danger as well as the avant-garde nature of that exhibition. Her Basel show also engaged with issues relating to Neocolonialism, the arms race and US militancy, bringing together photographs taken by Aby Warburg during his exploration of the Hopi tribe in Arizona in the mid 19th century, a video of her own journey on the footsteps of Warburg and snapshots taken by a Vietnam war veteran that Makuga acquired on the Internet. She juxtaposed these with images of contemporary events relating to Afghanistan and Iraq and the economic crisis. More recently she brought a tapestry of Guernica that normally hangs at the United Nations in New York, to the Whitechapel Gallery in London and used it as a backdrop for public meetings. At documenta in Kassel, she exhibited a tapestry that brought together photographic images of the artists in documenta and a view of people in Kabul. Macuga’s work is engaged with political issues of her times.   Goshka Macuga was born in 1967 in Warsaw (Poland). She lives and works in London (UK).