May They Rest in Peace، Great Art Body Exhumation by Diana Baldon

Diana Baldon is an Italian curator and critic, and the director of Malmö Konsthall, Sweden. She was previously the director of Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2011-14). Since 2002, she has curated a number of international exhibitions, including Counter-Production, Generali Foundation, Vienna (2012); and HEAVEN, 2nd Athens Biennale, Greece (2009). Baldon’s writing has appeared in a number of catalogues and international art magazines such as Artforum International, Flash Art, Texte zur Kunst, and Afterall.



Hunted like Frankenstein’s monster, twentieth century figures such as Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, and Walter Benjamin have mentally marked the contemporary art world for their views on social justice and equality. They represent the Golden Age of the European left. This presentation focuses on today’s relentless process by artists and curators alike to keep these figures’ canonized theories and productions (or, rather, their images) alive. In so doing, they ignore the fact that their activities can potentially transform them into unconscious gravediggers that fanatically exhume corpses of far-fetched contemporary relevance.