Many of the artists in the exhibition are interested in the way in which the material world and information shift and transform according to context and perspective – how texts, images or objects open up to our own interpretation and projection, sometimes playful, in other cases calling for moral or political evaluation, as in the work of Rabih Mroué or Eva & Franco Mattes. The artists in the exhibition use different ideas of performance to incorporate activity and processes as a method of making things ‘present’: people holding a string of bunting, or a huge video projection transforming the atmosphere through light in the gallery space. Performativity, in this sense, refers to moments of staging, appropriating and re-visiting existing materials and information, touching on questions of historiography and ownership, as in Louise Lawler’s photographs of artworks in private collections or Felix Gmelin’s re-iterated performance by his father. Rather than a moment of production, the artworks in the exhibition relate to the moment of the distribution of ideas. They investigate the increasing global flow of data in the information age, and the impact of their application – their performance – in a specific moment and situation on their meaning. These phenomena, which form an important part of the contemporary cultural economy, belong to the most prevailing conditions for artists working today. The exhibition presents works of artists responding to these conditions.

As an exhibition, Version Control creates an open space in which artworks are not confined to their own spatial and theoretical interpretation – they overlap, interacting and creating new relationships and meanings, sometimes even interfering with each other. As a kind of choreography though the spaces, each of the galleries focuses on a specific aspect of the field of research – the documentation and re-enactment of performances in Gallery 1, sculptures as performative objects in Gallery 2, appropriation as performance in Gallery 3, new information economies after the internet in Gallery 4. Other questions run throughout the exhibition, such as how can objects that appear passive be activated at specific times, occupying a certain amount of time rather than space. Another area of investigation is an ambivalence or ambiguity between documentation and an artwork. Sculptures become poems, which become records of (real or imagined) past acts, or alternate histories are explored and re-imagined. Some artistic strategies seem mirrored in others, using similar approaches, such as the idea of a ‘talk’ or ‘presentation’ to camera as a way to (re)present information. These video works are dealing with the mixing and editing of a subjective voice, and with its mediated quality, marking another layer of the meaning of performance.