Collection presentation curated by museum's director Bettina Steinbrügge, with Caroline Honorien and Alexine Taddeï.
Drawing from the Mudam Collection, international loans and archival materials, Video Killed the Radio Star: The 1980s and Their Cultural Echoes revisits the ‘long 1980s’, a pivotal period starting in the late 1970s and ending in the early 1990s, in which image overtook voice, access replaced ownership and aesthetics assumed a new political and cultural force. The exhibition examines the shifting perceptions and sensibilities of a world on the cusp of hyper-mediation.
On the occasion of Mudam’s twentieth anniversary, Video Killed the Radio Star reflects the collection’s longstanding and formative engagement with the period. By revisiting this decade and tracing its reverberations, the exhibition explores how the transformations of the 1980s still inform the present. In dialogue with contemporary history, it invites viewers to question what is often overlooked by Western art history. From this standpoint, the exhibition incorporates more recent artistic practices, as well as archival material, to develop a broader argument around the 1980s.
The exhibit is divided into two sections. The first examines how artists from the 1980s and today have challenged dominant regimes of representation in photography, painting and fashion, as well as through practices of institutional critique. The second turns to the geopolitical and media transformations of the end of the decade, from the collapse of communism to an emerging globalisation in which the concepts of the centre, periphery and marginality grew increasingly complex. The two sections are connected by the Foyer, an interstitial space built from archival material which plots the transition from mass consumerism to the attention economy.
More information: Mudam Luxembourg
