7 The realization of the exhibition Doug Aitken: Return to the Real is the fulfillment of a long-cherished wish. I first encountered Doug Aitken’s extraordinary video installations at the 1999 Venice Biennale. I was very fascinated by Electric Earth, which won the Golden Lion that year. It was already an impressive demonstration of what Aitken is saying about today’s ever-accelerating society: We live in a time of upheaval and uncertainty, part of an unprecedented technological and cultural revolution. He is driven by the question of how we find our way in this world, and how we shape the future. With his art, he wants to create tools of deceleration, to provide inspiration to reconnect with the idea of the self and the idea of the landscape around us. Almost ten years later, I encountered works by Aitken when we curated the SCHAUWERK’s inaugural exhibition of works from the Schaufler Collection. One room was dedicated to photography, and among the works on view were Turbulence (1999), Collision (2000), and Vanishing Point (2005). All three deal with aviation. For the entrepreneur and collector Peter Schaufler and his wife Christiane Schaufler-Münch, boarding an airplane to cover long distances quickly was an everyday experience. The statement of the female protagonist in Aitken’s video Black Mirror (2011), “Never stagnate, never stop. Share, connect, and move on,” was essentially his life’s motto as well. In 2015, together with co-curator Svenja Frank, I visited a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Doug Aitken at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt: an experience that still resonates today. Song 1 (2012/2015) and migration (empire) (2008), in particular, captivated us and encouraged us to show this artist at SCHAUWERK. Contact was made through his New York gallery, and we spoke to him personally for the first time about the possibility of an exhibition in a video call in April 2022. We were surprised and delighted that everything was quite simple. Very soon, we received specific proposals for this exhibition, whose starting signal was verbally sealed with “Let’s do it.” After a few more video calls, we finally had the opportunity to meet in person. We took the opening of the exhibition HOWL in June 2023 at his Zurich gallery as an opportunity to combine the visit with an interview, which can be read after this preface. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Doug Aitken and all those who contributed to the success of the project. Barbara Bergmann Sindelfingen, August 2023
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