Faites vos jeux!

The exhibition “Faites vos jeux!” presented artists who incorporate structures of play into their work. “Play” means setting up systems of rules, relating to rules and breaking them, testing strategies of action or providing variable scope for action, discovering the secrets of the things around us, creating a parallel world, slipping into different roles, exploring the interplay of chance and necessity in experimental set-ups, opening up a range of possibilities...“Play” is understood by the artists as a strategy.

The subject of “play” enjoyed a boom in the art world in 2006. In many places, exhibitions explored the unifying principles of art and play. However, no attempt to set the phenomenon of “play” into a wider art-historical context has been made to date. The exhibition “Faites vos jeux!” followed the assumption that playful thinking and an experimental attitude have been essential aspects of art in the 20th and 21st centuries. In this way it made a fundamental contribution to a new view of the art from this epoch. The approach is necessarily interdisciplinary, and music and film were taken into account alongside the fine arts.

On an area of about 1400 sqm, “Faites vos jeux!” showed approx. 100 works. Photographs, graphic artworks, objects, sculptures and installations, videos and films were exhibited. The over 100 works came from private and public collections as well as being on loan from the artists themselves.

The presentation was conceived as a travelling exhibition by Dr. Nike Bätzner, an art historian based in Berlin, and was shown in different forms at each exhibition venue: in 2005 at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; in 2006 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Siegen and subsequently at the Cobra Museum, Amsterdam.