NEW YORK—This week, the Museum of Modern Art opened the second installation of its second floor permanent collection galleries, which are devoted to contemporary art, with an exhibition entitled Take Two, Worlds and Views. The show, curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Roxana Marcoci, runs through July 3, 2006, and is the follow-up to the initial installation with which the museum inaugurated its new, Yoshio Taniguchi-designed building in fall of last year.

Due to the museum's international stature, the installations of MoMA's permanent collection galleries have always been closely scrutinized. And that scrutiny has only increased since the museum opened its new building. In 2000, for instance, the artist Frank Stella came down hard on the museum for placing the works in the MoMA 2000 series of exhibitions, the museum's last shows in its old building, according to theme rather than chronology. Of course, as MoMA curator Roxana Marcoci correctly points out, such linear, historical arrangements have also come under fire.

The curators spoke with Artinfo.com about the three themes in the exhibition artists experimenting with their bodies as an artistic medium, politics past and present, and the ways in which artists attempt to represent the sublime and ethereal by, for instance, using light and sound as materials. The show includes pieces dating from 1965 to the present. Many of these, including works by Marina Abramovic, James Lee Byars, Janet Cardiff, Gary Hill, Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Yinka Shonibare, are recent acquisitions, which have not previously been shown by MoMA. The curators spoke about how challenging and also thrilling it was to work on the installation.

Artinfo: Can you tell me a bit about the title, Take Two, Worlds and Views, and the themes you are exploring and how they relate to one another?

Klaus Biesenbach: Of course, Take Two refers to this being the second installation of the galleries; there will be three rotations a year. In terms of Worlds and Views, we have included artists from different generations, who have different backgrounds, are from different continents and have different political and ideological backgrounds. You have [Russian artist Ilya] Kabakov, [Italian artist] Gilberto Zorio, Warhol, and a piece made in response to apartheid by [South African artist William] Kentridge. All different worlds history past and present, politics past and present.

Roxana Marcoci: Unlike the first installation of these galleries, this is not a chronological display. The first time it was art from the 1970s, '80s and '90s, in three main rooms, and that was about it. We were interested in a more cross-generational presentation of the works; we used a series of large-scale installations as our points of departure. For the first part of this exhibition, they are the works by Bruce Nauman and Dieter Roth. The Roth is very diaristic, and the Nauman is also dealing with behavior; it's about the artist performer in the works. The works that we curated around these two large-scale installations became very much about shifting perceptions of identity in a media-constructed culture.

For the second part we again began with two large-scale installations, the Kabakovs and the Kentridge, so it became very much about politics, about the Cold War with the Kabakov representing the restrictions of life in the Soviet Union versus Kentridge's concern with apartheid. The works gathered around these two the Dana Schutz, the Andy Warhol, and others presented different views of the political landscape.

And in the third part we had the Janet Cardiff and the James Turrell, both of whose works dematerialize the art object, Turrell's being on light and Cardiff's working with sound. So it became about the sublime and then we had the other groupings surround these the Felix Gonzales-Torres and the James Lee Byars and the Alighiero e Boetti.

AI: There is this notion that work about the sublime is somehow the polar opposite of political work

RM: In the exhibition, you move from a physical experience of artworks to a conceptual experience, you go from the Kabakov, which is shown in a very constricted space with a low ceiling, to the expansive space that contains the Cardiff. We were interested in that expanded notion of vision.