Since 26 October 2019, the elaborately researched international group exhibition Artists & Agents – Performance art and Secret Services is on view at the HMKV in Dortmund, Germany. The exhibition, developed in cooperation with the Slavic Seminar of the University of Zurich, is curated by Inke Arns, Kata Krasznahorkai and Sylvia Sasse.
The exhibition focuses on the interaction between secret services and performance art – an art form that was considered particularly dangerous. Archives are accessible almost exclusively in Eastern Europe and reveal the "disruption" and "liquidation" of critical artists by state security services. For this, however, some of the agents had to become 'performance artists' themselves. Artists & Agents presents examples of artistic subversion and secret service infiltration, some of which have never been shown before. Recent works show: The question of the increasing use of secret service methods in today's politics and everyday life is highly topical.
The exhibition is featuring works by artists from Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, and the USA.