Human Conditions

The Kramlich Residence and Collection

2016 - 2020

After a long, five-decade journey of collecting, conversing, and collaborating, this exhibition marks a poignant moment. Part of a series of exhibitions of our collection of time-based media art, below documents Human Conditions, the first exhibition in our new home, a building sensitively designed by Herzog & de Meuron for displaying and living alongside these works. The staging of this exhibition and the making of the accompanying catalogue have given me and my husband, Dick Kramlich, a chance to reflect on what we have done, to try to make sense of a collecting process that has had so many twists and turns—and required so many leaps of faith.

It is impossible to overstate how excited we are finally to have a home for these works and to give visitors the chance to experience them. Once installed, the collection’s power is palpable. Of course, that power comes from the fact that the artists are responding to what is happening—exploring the large-scale challenges of so many contexts across the globe. Those big questions of the human condition were very much on my mind back in 2015, when I reviewed our collection with our first director, Aebhric Coleman. I kept asking myself, why? Why the challenges in the Middle East? Why another genocide in Bosnia? How do we understand the degradation of climate change? How will we redress the legacies of apartheid in South Africa or of slavery in the United States? Why are people having to endure a war in Congo or a nuclear meltdown in Japan? It became clear that we needed to feature works that put those questions on the table. Even Jane and Louise Wilson’s Stasi City, a piece that addresses an earlier period in our recent history—the fall of the Berlin Wall—still feels timely, as it forces us to think about how we want to be governed as a society. In other instances, those anxious issues around power surface in more intimate spaces, such as Bruce Nauman’s relentless Raw Material—OK, OK, OK, or Dara Birnbaum’s Attack Piece.

Human Conditions was curated by Pamela Kramlich and Aehbric Coleman with support from Andrea Nitsche-Krupp, Rebecca Groves, Courtney Fellion, and Katherine Wade.

Exhibition Walkthrough

Artists in the Exhibition

Publication