LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN: Photography as analytical practice

This exhibition shines the spotlight on Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), one of the most important 20th-century philosophers, whose bourgeois family made essential contributions to the evolution and promotion of Viennese Modernism. Rather than focusing on his ground-breaking philosophical writings or their influence on the visual arts, however, the presentation explores Wittgenstein as a photographer – as an author, collector and arranger of photographs. Thus, the exhibition uncovers a hitherto largely unnoticed sideshow which is now analyzed for the first time in detail and with a broadly defined understanding of photography.

The exhibition showcases Wittgenstein’s previously only partly published photo album from the 1930s, the famous composite portrait of the Wittgenstein siblings, photo booth pictures and other staged self-portraits, photographs of the house for Margarete ­Stonborough-Wittgenstein he had designed together with Paul Engelmann, excerpts from his Nonsense Collection as well as a representative selection of his picture postcard correspondence with family and friends, which reveals a communication practice that invariably also includes the image plane of this medium. Against the background of his deliberations on photography, which went as far as his intention to write a “Laocoon for photographers”, these materials invite a contemporary reappraisal of Wittgenstein’s understanding and use of the medium of photography.

The exhibition places Wittgenstein’s photographs into a dialogue with the photographic practices or theories of contemporary artists, including Vito Acconci, Miriam Bäckström, John Baldessari, Gottfried Bechtold, Anna und Bernhard Blume, Christian Boltanski, Hanne Darboven, Ólafur Eliasson, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Günther Förg, Herbert W. Franke, Nan Goldin, Peter Handke, Heinrich Heidersberger, Peter Hujar, Anna Jermolaewa, Birgit Jürgenssen, Mike Kelley, Anastasia Khoroshilova, Friedl Kubelka, David Lamelas, Sherrie Levine, Sharon Lockhart, Inés Lombardi, Dóra Maurer, Trevor Paglen, Sigmar Polke, Timm Rautert, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler, Thomas Ruff, Norman Saunders, Alfons Schilling, Cindy Sherman, Katharina Sieverding, Margherita Spiluttini, Dominik Steiger, Sturtevant, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andy Warhol, Gillian Wearing, Peter Weibel, Manfred Willmann, Otto Zitko, Heimo Zobernig, and others.