The Collection in Action. Media works from Vito Acconci to Simon Starling

These were the issues tackled in the exhibition “The Collection in Action”, which opened on 25th November during the “Lunga Notte dei Musei di Bolzano” museum event. Activated with a helping hand from technology, the works, after being produced and installed, thus came to life in the venue. Many left storage to be presented to the public for the very first time, continuing Museion’s exploration of the different nuclei of artworks in its collection.

The exhibition opened on the second floor of Museion with the video installation From Here to There (2003) by Jana Sterbak. The sequences shot in Montreal and Venice have been filmed by a dog, a Jack Russell called Stanley. Equipped with a tiny camera, Stanley filmed his vision of the world, 35 cm above the ground, and the viewer is therefore obliged to adopt this original four-legged viewpoint.

This exercise in perception, enhanced by Jana Sterbak’s editing, stimulates our imagination, challenging the automatic mechanisms at work when we perceive our surroundings, and our stereotyped view of the world. This is an aspect that characterised much of the art in the exhibition: these artworks were not there simply to be contemplated. Rather than a “front on” encounter with art in a set time and space, they elicited a “decentred” approach, in which the temporal dimension played a key role.

The works on show were therefore based on the idea of an active viewer who moves around them and experiences them for their duration, engaging critically with the issues they raise. Lastly the exhibition also involved the façade of Museion, with a video created for the occasion by the artist Michael Fliri, The unseen looks like something you have never seen, 2011. This playfully tautological title alludes to the imaginative potential that every work of art contains.