Held Together with Water Art from the Sammlung Verbund

Istanbul Museum of Modern Art presented the exhibition "Held Together with Water", prepared with the co-operation of Gabriele Schor, the Director of the Verbund Collection, and Levent Çalıkoğlu, chief curator of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art.

The Verbund Collection, brought to life by Verbund, Austria’s leading electricity company, as a contemporary, internationally oriented and elite collection, i-was exhibited for the first time in the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art outside of Austria.

The exhibition titled "Held Together with Water", with its themes of "Performance" and "Spaces / Places", highlighted the specific lines of contact in contemporary art, extending from the 1970’s to our day. The exhibition articulated, with these two themes, how a lot of female and male artists abandoned painting and steered towards completely new forms of expression, and the transformation to photography, video and spatial installations.

116 works by 39 artists who have steered the contemporary art world, like Cindy Sherman, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Wall, Ernesto Neto, Gilbert&George, Francis Alÿs, Nan Goldin, Sarah Lucas, Fred Sandback, Eleanor Antin, Cecil Beaton, Bernd-Hilla Becher, Johanna Billing, Valie Export, Kate Gilmore, Birgit Jügenssen, Louise Lawler, Ursula Mayer, Urs Lüthi, Gabriel Orozco, Loan Nguyen, Ed Ruscha, Markus Schinwald, Simon Starling, Gillian Wearing, Lawrence Weiner, Francesca Woodman and Nil Yalter are in exhibition.

Under the title "Performance", in a process starting with the 1970’s, the orientation of the artists towards trends like the discovery of their own bodies, questioning their identity, and the feminist rebellion are dealt with.

As for the theme of "Spaces and Places", it focused on the relationship art builds with spaces, visualising how spaces were deconstructed by artists, and then again integrated.

*"This is a work by Lawrence Weiner from 1993."