In 1970, Günter Brus, a co-founder of the Viennese Actionism movement, staged his final—and most alarming—live performance. Describing it as the radical climax of his “self-mutilations,” he pushed his body past its limits, whipping and beating himself, cutting his shaven head, urinating on himself. It was, he said, as far as he could go without dying. A form of social critique that was meant to expose the repression and darkness Brus saw embedded in society, that performance is now the point of departure for a sombre exhibition on the upheavals of the 20th century, a period beginning with W.W. II and the Holocaust and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall. What does “extreme tension” yield in artistic practice? Answers come in artworks by figures such as Marina Abramović, Lee Bontecou, Bridget Riley, and Willi Sitte. —Elena Clavarino