In his artworks, MARTIN BECK explores issues of display, i.e. strategies of presentation, memory, collectivity and themes like the invention and production of images. Architecture, design and everyday culture are recurring subjects. One of his main work complexes concerns modern exhibition systems and their relationship to empowerment and control.

His video installation About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007), for which he reconstructed a presentation system developed by the designer George Nelson from the 1940s, reflects on the paradox role of modular systems in the history of exhibiting. On the one hand, Nelson’s Struc-Tube exhibition system corresponds to the avant-garde demand for easy handling and far-reaching imparting of information, but on the other it symbolizes the reorganisation of labour in modern capitalism. About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe further carries the contradictions concerning the status of work to extremes. The reference to a trade union meeting scheduled to discuss the precarious working conditions of freelancers, as well as the presented work of a construction team, concretise the ambivalence of postulates of freedom in the art world in light of their economic foundation.

(Text by Matthias Michalka, in Yesterday, Today, Today, booklet on the exhibition, Kunstraum Buchberg 2018)

Installed in the context of the exhibition Yesterday, Today, Today, curated in cooperation with the mumok − Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Buchberger Sommer 2018 [Buchberg Summer 2018]