Leon Kahane, Criticism and Self-Criticism in Free Time
The title draws on the Marxist-Leninist concept of “criticism and self-criticism” and connects it to an ambivalent notion of freedom. "Free time" refers both to a social model and to a historically contingent notion of time, reflecting how different political systems and societies organise and understand work, education, leisure and individual freedom. These ideas, in turn, reflect the political conditions under which art is produced. The exhibition considers the position of artistic practice between social responsibility, personal agency and artistic autonomy, and asks what remains of these shifting conditions in images, memories and forms of photographic and cinematic representation.
These questions take shape in a new body of work spanning photography, film and installation. Its starting point is Sport, Biology and Leisure (1970), a public mural by Doris Kahane in Berlin-Johannisthal. In his contemporary engagement with the mural, Leon Kahane reflects on artistic practice caught between political zeitgeist, institutional commissions and social responsibility. The exhibition connects this work to Kahane’s own photographs, taken twenty years ago while working as a photojournalist in the West Bank, and to an oral history interview with his grandfather, which brings his childhood in the Scheunenviertel - the historic district in which the Kunstverein is now located - into dialogue with contemporary debates.
