A step into the unknown – Allianz and MoMA team up to support contemporary art

Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency comprises almost 700 snapshot-like portraits underlined with a music soundtrack. It’s a personal narrative based on Goldin’s personal experiences around Boston, New York, and Berlin in the late 70s and 80s.

The exhibition is titled after a song in Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera”. The protagonists – including Goldin herself – are captured in intimate moments of love and loss.

Goldin portrays her protagonists experiencing ecstasy and pain through sex and drug use, celebrating at dance clubs and with their children at home but also suffering from domestic violence and the consequences of HIV/AIDS.

Lovers is a multimedia installation by Japanese artist Teiji Furuhashi. Life-sized images of the artist and other fellow members of the Kyoto-based artist collective Dumb Type are projected onto the walls of a darkened room. These “lovers” run past each other or stop to seemingly embrace but never make actual contact.

Tony Oursler’s Imponderable (2015–16) presents the intersection of technology and its advancements and occult or mystic phenomena of the last two centuries. It’s a feature length film using a contemporary version of the so-called “Pepper’s Ghost” device.

“Pepper's ghost” is an illusion technique used in theatre or amusement parks where an audience views a stage or room with various objects in it. On command, ghostly objects appear to fade in or out of existence in the room, or objects in the room magically transform into different objects.

Tony Oursler has a great interest in stage magic, spirit photography, and other manifestations of the paranormal. With Imponderable he combines this special interest with his own family history. Some of his family relatives had close relationships to for example Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Harry Houdini so these characters and others appear in his installation.

Imponderable brings together Oursler’s ongoing interest in mysticism, psychedelia, popular culture, and media history. Hs film relies on a kind of macabre humor and the illusions of theatrical surrealism to reflect on the irrational relationship between belief systems and the authenticity of images.

Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project is an installation of eight videos produced from 2008 to 2011, telling the stories of eight individuals who were forced to flee and travel illegally forced by political and economic circumstances. Their journeys have taken them across the Mediterranean basin, from their original homes to their current places of residence.

Khalili met her protagonists by chance in transit hubs across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East and invited each subject to narrate his or her journey and trace it in thick permanent marker on a geopolitical map of the region. The videos feature only the voices of the subjects and their hands sketching their trajectories across the map, while their faces remain unseen.