DUSSELDORF.- For the first time, the exhibition “MOVE – Art and Dance since the 60s offers an overview of the relationship between the visual arts, dance, movement, and choreography over the past 50 years and up to the present day. Currently on view sculptures and installations by artists, dancers, and choreographers which influence the movements of exhibition visitors in a variety of ways. “Not depictions of movement but instead movement itself is the theme of this exhibition,” explains Doris Krystof, curator of the Düsseldorf version. Vision and movement - according to the argument presented by MOVE - are resources of perception and knowledge that function on equal terms.

The exhibition, which runs from July 19 to September 25 at the K20 Grabbeplatz, encompasses works by Janine Antoni, Pablo Bronstein, Trisha Brown, Boris Charmatz, Lygia Clark, William Forsythe, Simone Forti, Dan Graham, Christian Jankowski, Isaac Julien, Mike Kelley, La Ribot, Xavier Le Roy & Mårten Spångberg, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, João Penalva, Tino Sehgal, Franz Erhard Walther, and Franz West.

MOVE explores the ways in which everyday movement became the driving force for the development of both contemporary art as well as modern dance. The exhibition demonstrates how artists deployed choreography as an artistic resource in order to compel viewers to experience works of art with their entire bodies. To an increasing degree over the past two decades, artists have turned to the resources of dance and performance in order to discover how everyday activities can be choreographed and manipulated.

William Forsythe refers to his 2009 installation The Fact of Matter as a “choreographic object”: suspended at a variety of heights from the gallery ceiling are 200 rings; as a test of physical strength and mental flexibility, so to speak, visitors are invited to step from one ring to the next, thereby traversing the space without touching the floor. Mike Kelley’s multipart Test Room (2001) takes the form of a playroom in which oversized objects such as large plastic clubs, basins, bowls, or dummies enjoin visitors to engage in a variety of activities. Robert Morris's Bodyspacemotionthings (1971/2010) is a large wooden seesaw which can be used by a number of visitors, and Pablo Bronstein has constructed a large triumphal arch in the Klee-Halle of K20 which becomes a place of danced veneration.

An interactive archive which has been integrated into the exhibition places the theme of art and dance in an expanded historical context. The selection encompasses more than 170 photographs (Merce Cunningham, Allan Kaprow, Yvonne Rainer, Meg Stuart, Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, Sasha Walz, among many others). The archive was developed especially for the exhibition under the supervision of André Lepecki, Professor of Performance Studies at New York University.