Playgrounds (1995–2021) is one of Friedl’s longterm projects showing documentary-style photos of play areas taken by the artist around the globe. The pictures play with the genre of conceptual photography and research underscoring urban typologies of modernist planning, which can be interpreted as a remnant of twentieth-century utopias. While place and time are stated, the distanced view (always through the same analogue camera), which favours aesthetics over functionality, emphasizes their apparent similarities and diversity. The work contains over 1,200 digitized color slides arranged alphabetically according to the location names.
Playgrounds, 1995–2021
Digitized slides
Digitized slides, wall projection
dimensions variable
installation views: MACBA, Barcelona, 2006, Photo: Tony Coll, Miami Art Central, Miami, 2007, 10th Shanghai Biennale, 2015, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2022, Photo: Frank Sperling
Peter Friedl
Peter Friedl is a classic of contemporary art. The three-time documenta participant, born in 1960, can be considered a notorious participant in discourse - because his work has always understood how to address major themes in such a way that they found and find new forms away from the canon and mainstream. Forms that run counter to power and domination, subvert them, escape them.... and confront them in the process. Friedl takes away from history - for example colonialism or modernity, its paradigms and institutions - the power to define what is connected and how, and with an almost innocent-seeming aesthetic he tells a different story about humans and historical actions than we are used to and may find opportune. Peter Friedl provokes that which dominates us, including our own thinking. Throughout the years he his work has been displayed in meaningful solo exhibitions, most recently Teatro Popular (KOW Berlin, 2023), Report 1964-2022 (KW Berlin 2022) and No Prey, No Pay (Guido Costa Projects Turin, 2021) and major group exhibitions such as Life, Without Buildings, Gta exhibitions (ETH Zurich 2022), Das Auto rosi aber (KOW Berlin 2022) and Komunikazion - Inkomunikazio (Tabakalera, Centre for Contemporary Art, San Sebastian 2021).
- Anna Boghiguian
- Candice Breitz
- Marco A. Castillo
- CATPC
- Alice Creischer
- Chto Delat
- Clegg & Guttmann
- Eugenio Dittborn
- Heinrich Dunst
- Anna Ehrenstein
- Estate of León Ferrari
- Peter Friedl
- Sophie Gogl
- Estate of Barbara Hammer
- The Cabinet of Ramon Haze
- Hiwa K
- Simon Lehner
- Renzo Martens
- Chris Martin
- Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger
- Oswald Oberhuber
- Mario Pfeifer
- Dierk Schmidt
- Tina Schulz
- Santiago Sierra
- Michael E. Smith
- Franz Erhard Walther
- Clemens von Wedemeyer
- Tobias Zielony