The first exhibition at the MMK 2 – "Boom She Boom: Works from the MMK Collection" is devoted to women artists in the MMK collection. Among Germany’s contemporary art museums, the MMK is unique in that, from its founding in 1991 to the present, it has directed special attention to the strong contributions of women artists of the past decades.
A survey of the purchases made over the past years strikingly mirrors the fact that women artists account for a very large number of the MMK collection’s recent acquisitions. Major works by Vanessa Beecroft, Rineke Dijkstra, Teresa Margolles, Sarah Morris, Taryn Simon and others mark significant expansions of the collection, which more recently has been enhanced with workgroups by women presently in the limelight of the international art world, for example Andrea Büttner, Jewyo Rhij, Dayanita Singh and Dolores Zinny. From the beginning, the MMK has also devoted itself to the Frankfurt art scene, and here as well the museum’s holdings are enriched by such individualist and radical perspectives as that of Anne Imhof, Franziska Kneidl and Adrian Williams.
The exhibition title “Boom She Boom” quotes the sensationally successful doo-wop song of 1954 by the Chords, which has undergone many reinterpretations since that time.

Jo Baer - Vanessa Beecroft - Shannon Bool - Andrea Büttner - Vija Celmins - Hanne Darboven - Rineke Dijkstra - Marlène Dumas - Parastou Forouhar - Katharina Fritsch - Isa Genzken - Tamara Grčić - Bethan Huws - Anne Imhof - Barbara Klemm - Eva Kotátková - Franziska Kneidl - Teresa Margolles - Sarah Morris - Cady Noland - Anja Niedringhaus - Christa Näher - Charlotte Posenenske - Jewyo Rhii - Taryn Simon - [Elaine Frances Sturtevant] Sturtevant - Rosemarie Trockel - Adrian Williams -
Curator Susanne Gaensheimer - Peter Gorschlüter -

'Evidence' – this term is a central aspect of the artistic work of Taryn Simon. From diverse angles the American photographer explores the evidential value of photography, its factual power to transform assertions into reality.
The young photographer became internationally known in the mid-1990s with her work Innocents, a series of staged portraits of persons unjustly convicted (often social outcasts) in the United States. This view of things was followed up by the images that went to make up An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar: In each we see a certain constellation of things from the most disparate social areas such as science or religion, which act to contradict the American myth of liberty and equal rights.
What Taryn Simon’s works all have in common is the fascinating method the photographer employs to illuminate the „Dark Side of Life”, to make visible things previously unseen and to expand the dimension behind the visible using text. As such she represents one of the most important positions of an expanded concept of documentary photographic work.

The Olbricht Collection (Essen) possesses an extraordinary set of works from this young oeuvre. A selection of them will be on view from 9 November in the  Section "Post-War and Contemporary Art".

Taryn Simon -