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In the tradition of the american Show and Tell, which consists in the sliding of some images commented briefly and in improvised manner, and which refuses any rigorous theoretical investigation, Hans Haacke reviews some of his works: from the poll about american intervention in Vietnam (New York, 1970) to the marble tiles for the German Pavilion (Venice, 1993); from Calligraphy installation (Paris, 1989), which showed the inconsistency of the french motto liberté, égalité, fraternité, to the intervention for the 2009 Venice Biennale, in collaboration with palestinian and israeli artists. Haacke’s artworks are deeply interactive and influenced by external spatialities. Since the beginning, he aims to evade the regime of privilege and isolation of institutional spaces to enter the core of the sociopolitical context in which the artworks are projected, produced and received.

Hans Haacke (b. 1936, Cologne, Germany) lives and works in New York. He taught at The Cooper Union, New York from 1967 to 2002. For the last four decades, Haacke has been looking at the relationship between art, power, money, and has addressed the issues of free expression and civic responsibilities in a democratic society. His early work dealt with physical and organic processes, he then increasingly focused on the socio-political context in which art is exhibited and traded. A one-person exhibition, scheduled at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971, was cancelled by the museum because of a visitors' poll and two works analyzing New York real estate empires.

Haacke’s solo shows were held at Tate Gallery, London; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Serpentine Gallery, London; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg and Akademie der Künste, Berlin. His work was included at Documenta four times and in numerous biennials around the world such as the Gwangju Biennial (2008). After a heated national debate, Haacke’s permanent installation was inaugurated in 2000 in the Reichstag, the German Parliament building in Berlin. He. shared a Golden Lion with Nam June Paik for the best pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennial. Free Exchange, a conversation of the artist with Pierre Bourdieu, was published in 1995 by Stanford University Press and was translated in eight languages