MARTIN KUNZ, Founder and Promoter of K10 Kunzarchive & Projects is proud to announce the start of periodical events and activities activating this archive as a kind of Center for Contemporary Art, Curatorial Studies and Practice, in collaboration also with other institutions. The events are devoted to themes, documents, and works to be shown, discussed, and documented, about art and artists that are part of K10-kunzar- chive. In the archive, materials, books, and works are assembled, tracing over 35 years of curatorial activities, 25 years of which Kunz spent as director of 3 different museums, in Lucerne, New York, and Ascona, for which he was responsible for curating, publishing, and production. Over 200 exhibitions and 150 publications are included in his career, many at Biennales, museums, and other spaces, from the Venice Biennial, the Edinburgh International, the Trigon Biennale-Styrian Autumn in Graz, to major museums around the world.
As the initial projects will demonstrate, the art and artists shown will not be restricted to the past but will combine and integrate still emerging artists with artists of previous decades. Some are little known here but already receiving international attention elsewhere. Some have been well-known in the past but less exposed recently and deserve new consideration.
The first round of events has been created around the multi-talented artist and photographer Allen Frame, who has been not just a great photographer, artist and friend in New York, but also a successful teacher and curator-artist who has supported both artists of his own generation and younger artists, including his former students. He was also a crucial voice in support of the many friends of his generation who suffered from and died of AIDS. In 1990, with Nan Goldin and Frank Franca, he created the photo projection piece, Electric Blanket, which was presented throughout the U.S. and in many other countries, including Japan, Hungary, Germany, Norway, and Russia.
The first event will be a Workshop with Allen Frame, for a small group of advanced and intermediate photo- graphers, limited to 8, to further the development of their work by helping them focus their approach and content. (See: K10/Bulletin #001)
Right after this workshop, we will open the exhibition, “The Artists Who Came in from the Cold: From Siberia to the Stanford Hotel,” including works by Allen Frame but also by two younger photographers, Emile Hype- rion Dubuisson (from France, living in New York) and Mauro Restiffe ( living in Sao Paulo). I curated this exhibition in 2013 for the Centro Luigi di Sarro in Rome, under the title, “Gli artist che giunsero dal freddo. Dalla Siberia allo Stanford Hotel.” Now before returning the work to the artists, I am taking the opportunity to present this material as the first exhibition at K10-kunzarchive. (See: K10/Bulletin #002) We plan to close this first cycle and the show with an artist talk by Mauro Restiffe, who will be visiting after an exhibition of his work at a new museum for contemporary art in Moscow, where a large selection from the same group of Russian photographs will be exhibited. He will talk about his recent work in the favelas of Rio. (See: K10/Bul- letin #003)
We will keep you informed of future projects and events at the K10-kunzarchive and other projects organised and produced by Martin Kunz elsewhere.