‘New Ambitions’

With works by Minda Andrén, Olivia Coeln, Birke Gorm, Jojo Gronostay, Lukas Kaufmann, Irina Lotarevich, Evelyn Plaschg, Marina Sula, Valentina Triet, Andreas Werner and Min Yoon

Federal chancellery, Vienna

9 February 2023 – 9 May 2024

Austria boasts a very vibrant contemporary art scene. Viewers can enjoy works from this art movement at around 100 institutional exhibition venues, including museums and art galleries, as well as at almost 100 independent art associations – so-called “offspaces” – run mainly by artists. In Vienna alone, over 150 artists graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Applied Arts in 2022, expanding the already vast spectrum of contemporary artwork. The variety of exhibitions held across approximately 110 contemporary galleries in Austria reflects this emerging art scene’s dynamic and ambitious nature. Members of the Association of Austrian Modern Art Galleries currently represent many artists of the newest generation, and this exhibition featured a selection of their works.

Although it was not a representative cross-section, it did, however, illustrate the immense diversity and vitality of art created locally. The large number of artists born outside of Austria but who now live and work here is indeed a testimony to this country’s appeal as one offering ideal conditions for creation, exchange and presentation. The sheer density of protagonists, initiatives, institutions and galleries bears witness to an emerging Austrian art scene that stands out internationally and whose dynamism and commitment were explored in this compilation.

‘Wetting Your Whistles’

With works by Cho Beom-Seok, Jaiwon Choi, Boma Pak, Rondi Park, Seohyun Sue Park, Sun Woo & Muyeong Kim

Art Sonje Center, Seoul

11 May 2023

Social ties are established while drinking, people communicate and interact. The choice of drinks thereby also defines the relation of the participants among each other, while the rituals connected to them force the structure of the way of being together. The artists of this two hour long exhibition conceived and appropriated a variety of drinks, respectively formulated instructions on how to use them. What normally accompanies the communication, becomes the subject matter in this participative exhibition. In the tradition of relational aesthetics it transforms a conversation piece into a social sculpture – and the other way around.

With the work ‘Hey, it's not just a glass of water.’, Cho Beom-Seok (*1986) offered a variety of different still waters to drink, while posing questions to visitors and documenting the situation at Art Sonje Center's rooftop with his camera. At the table of Jaiwon Choi (*1996), one could taste a drink including flowers and herbs from the mountains. Boma Pak (*1988) recreated a piece that she first did in Bremen in 2011. During a night walk there, she perceived the water of a river as not flowing in the darkness, thus also as a magical moment of a halting of time. She transformed this experience into ‘Blackwater’, a mixture of red wine, green and blue food colourings, that was drunk by people during the event in the evening and ‘ended in the ocean at night’. With ‘Though I won't be present’ by Rondi Park (*1993), she provided one with ‘a small ritual personalised for you and your independent taste’, consisting of an instruction, incense to burn and stick in a rice bowl, wafer to eat and wine to drink. ‘My body and blood will fuel you, stimulate you, hopefully refresh you to want more’, she stated, though she wasn't present. A fish gall bladder soju shot from a variety of fresh water and salt water fishes was served by Seohyun Sue Park (*1992). Her father introduced her to this drink, who always encouraged her to consume raw foods. Rich in vitamin A, allegedly good for digestion, skin, stamina, and against both aging and hangovers, the artist drew a parallel between a traditional healing beverage and a current trend for functional drinks: ‘Drink your gallbladder, get drunk, get promoted, live forever.’ Sun Woo (*1994) and Muyeong Kim (*1995) served something to drink and something to lick, accompanied by a reading of ‘Two or three let-offs’ by Kim, before the sun slowly went down.

‘Having (and Being)’

With works by Birke Gorm, Jojo Gronostay, Demian Kern, Marilia Kolibiri, Katerina Komianou, Irina Lotarevich, Lazar Lyutakov, Rondi Park, Kerstin von Gabain and Min Yoon

Callirrhoë, Athens

25 January – 30 March 2024

We are not just surrounded by things; we also surround ourselves with them. And they tell more than we might assume. The relationship we develop with things reflects who we are. What we have is not only what we need but also a reflection of how we want others to perceive us. Hence, having and being are aspects that influence each other, making the human essence tangible. The exhibition attempts to describe our multifaceted being through materializations of desires. Sculptures, readymades, photographs and paintings bring us closer to ourselves, but also to the things we live with.

The use of materials is crucial in Birke Gorm’s works. The primary material is jute, which Gorm (born in 1986) combines with polypropylene yarn and aluminum. The women depicted in the artworks are engaged in activities in kitchens—taking objects down, putting them up, and reorganizing what is needed. Of course, this is a critique of labor and its implications for gender equality, as addressed by Gorm.

The sculptures by Jojo Gronostay (*1987) are not large in size but are intensely black. They give the impression of African sculptures crafted from ebony, yet they are actually composed of two flacons and coated with black paint. While modernist art in the 1920s drew inspiration from African art, Gronostay takes a twist in the opposite direction by transforming consumerist items into something that bridges postcolonialism, identity, and global economic structures.

The painting by Demian Kern (*1990) is an oily reproduction of projections. The image projected onto the canvas consists of pieces from a Swarovski collection of figures. What is typically transparent, light, and shiny transforms into an opaque structure of reflections. We can still recognize the original filter, but the forms we see have little in common with the glittering world that the company is known for.

The works of Marilia Kolibri (*1993) mostly revolve around everything we consume—whether it be food, products, or images. In contrast to her solo show, the ceramics in the group exhibition focus on how we share pictures of everything we appreciate. Naturally, it’s not limited to animals, cakes, or fashion; the central theme is often the very own body, which becomes objectified and turns into a matter of social-media narcissism.

The figurines by Katerina Komianou (*1984) don’t just resemble cats; they serve as symbols warding off evil. Similar to apotropaic statues, they protect us from negative forces. Acting as sacred gatekeepers, they safeguard our connection to wilderness and purification—much like a magic amulet might shield us from the evil eye.

Two works by Irina Lotarevich (*1991) encompass our object-ability. ‘Steel Price Index (test strip)’ is a condensed version of a metal workshop’s catalogue index, where the larger type corresponds to the artist’s height. On the other hand, ‘Binder with Skins 1’ is a cast of a folder with two pieces of meat on top of it. Having moved from Russia to the USA and then to Austria, binders were the first choice for gathering personal documents to prove her identity.

The installation by Lazar Lyutakov (*1977) consists of a metal structure and two lava lamps. The metal structure adds a certain seriousness to the work, which is counterbalanced by the two amorphous lights. They are quite humorous in relation to the technicality of the arrangement, thus not very functional. Even though they share light, they are more designed to highlight the interplay of their wax fillings. Interestingly, the lava lamp fillings are used on the humorous side to generate security codes that contribute to making our internet a safer space.

The two works by Rondi Park (*1993) point in opposite directions. One features a tree bearing fruit, symbolizing the burden of desire and the intricate feeling of inadequacy. Although the tree generously relinquishes its offspring to gravity, this starkly contrasts with the absence of a friend who disappeared during the creation of the artwork. The other piece originates from Goody Hair Pin, a ribbon brand that the young artist wore in the 1990s. The work is a blend of different motifs from Goody Pin, exploring themes of kindred spirits and the artist’s childhood aspiration: to have a friend with whom she could feel safe.

The sculpture by Kerstin von Gabain (*1979) is neither an original nor a fake; instead, it exists in the realm between questions of representation and imitation, inner experiences, and emotions. The artist employs mimesis as a tool to mediate between the external world and its reflection within the artistic work. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether the nose of Pinocchio is modelled in life-size.

The works by Min Yoon (*1986) consist of two small sculptures that fall between the media typically found in his body of work. While he primarily creates sculptures using various materials and drawings, the two exhibited pencils are inscribed with the words: ‘Easy to identify and symbolise.’ This phrase is a slight variation of a sentence found on BIC ballpoint pens, serving, as the artist describes it, “as a description of the good design of its commodity.”

The exhibition was kindly supported by the Federal Ministry of the Republic of Austria for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport

‘Bread and Digestifs’

With works by Eleni Bagaki, Carina Brandes, Anastasia Douka, Francesco Gennari, Sophie Gogl, Lisa Holzer, Christian Jankowski, Jiří Kovanda, Soshiro Matsubara, Orestis Mavroudis, Maria Nikiforaki, Daniel Stempfer, Marina Sula and Philipp Timischl, a short film by Jørgen Leth and a hand axe

Callirrhoë, Athens

27 January – 24 March 2022

In addition to fat and protein, humans primarily need carbohydrates for their metabolism. The WHO recommends a 55-75% calorie content of carbohydrates in the diet. Bread can deliver that. It is compact energy and a staple food due to its ease of manufacture, storage and transport. You need bread to function. You earn bread by working. You work so that you have something to drink, something to eat, something to wear and something to sleep in. Those who earned themselves a place to sleep can seclude. But isn't isolation the downside of privacy? Bread also becomes hard if it lies around for too long. But if you have a stone in your stomach, you still have to digest it.

A stone in your hand, on the other hand, can be a tool. The stone in the exhibition used to be a tool a long time ago. Actually, the hand axe is the first tool to be used by humans. It's unknown what it was used for. But it's obvious that it had one or more functions connected to basic human needs.

Just a stone’s throw away in history is the house that provides shelter. In the show, Jiří Kovanda made one out of sugar. Sugar is sweet; sugar has not been always available -as it is today- and sugar tends to melt away under rain and heat. Thus, it is obviously not the best material for a house, but something that people like to have around them.

The bread by Daniel Stempfer is nothing edible. It's a 3D print made after scans. During the pandemic, the only unregulated activity left in the public space of Hong Kong was individual sports. The artist used the salt of his sweat to bake bread (that provides energy for more sporting activities). Thus, the 3D print is an archiving of the cycles of absorbing and releasing energy during the pandemic.

The snail on the photograph of Francesco Gennari also goes in circles. Having lost its footing on a dollop of whipped cream, it starts to turn around itself instead of getting any further.

In Carina Brandes's photograph, the artist is hanging on a string to dry in the sun, like the textiles next to her. The human becomes inactive, the subject becomes an object, pausing in a state of awaiting its reactivation in a brighter future.

In her painting, Eleni Bagaki lets herself "immerse under the sun". Only the feet are sticking out of the water, becoming a fragment of the body- just like her "standing hand" that is an image of a body part and not an actual body, more like the debris of an ancient sculpture that once portrayed an individual now forgotten.

Philipp Timischl's depiction of a young man goes into an opposite direction. He seems highly active, trained and muscular. His self-optimization becomes manifest in building his body, thus also embodying an object.

The man and the woman in Jørgen Leth's film are presented in a way that one would rather expect to see in an animal documentary. We observe our objects of interest during their everyday activities, some eccentric performances and we experience their weak moments in order to learn about "the perfect human".

In Christian Jankowski's video, we see him walk into a supermarket with a bow in his hands. He is on the prowl, but what he is hunting down are processed foods and goods that he pierces with arrows. He is going back to the roots, drastically ironing out the alienations and abstractions of modern life.

Sophie Gogl's painting is an enlargement of an objet trouvé (found object): The cap of a Fanta bottle. On an inscription, it asks the buyer to recycle it, thus claiming the status of a speaking subject (requesting to be treated like an object that has lost its use) - while also reducing the role of the consumer to a passive one.

A still life of consumer goods by Marina Sula kidnaps the formal language of advertising photography to exaggerate the banality of the things that surround us. Another one shows two motorcyclists sleeping on a boat, with their armor and helmets taken down - vulnerable for a moment before they rush away again.

The tin lid of Anastasia Douka's work is perforated with the word "sex", connecting the world of food and bodily desires. But it also raises associations to things that were conserved (in masses) and suddenly emerge again.

Lisa Holzer's grapes play with being objects of desire: they "(always) hang too high (for almost everyone), they remain a promise, they are not to reach like the positive magical effects of the trickle-down-effect. They trickle downstairs and are not to be found anywhere."

The grapes in Maria Nikiforaki's video are pressed between the chest of a man and the feet of a woman. The collaborative making of wine here shows its erotic potential between excess and expenditure and points towards an alternative, more pleasurable idea of economy.

In the two paintings by Soshiro Matsubara, two heads are depicted kissing each other. The protagonists are Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, who had an affair over the course of 3 years that ended abruptly in 1914. It's all about tragic love and loss and its recurring commemoration.

Finally, Orestis Mavroudis's "Note on Death #5" depicts the 16 orders of soil taxonomy in a side view of the depth of 110 cm. The cut-outs represent the gap between 30 and 110 cm, in which a coffin is normally buried. And that's where we turn into humus, becoming a good foundation for new forms of life.

The exhibition was kindly supported by the Federal Ministry of the Republic of Austria for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport

Lois Weinberger

‘Basics’

Belvedere 21, Vienna

1 July – 24 October 2021

Basics

The man on the catalogue cover wears a piece of seashell jewelry under his nose as though he were a member of an Indigenous community. He also wears glasses and a shirt; his gaze is downcast and serious. The face belongs to Lois Weinberger, and he has painted it green. Why does he present himself in this manner? Is he trying to provoke us with a stereotype of the Civilized Savage? Or does he wish to embody a Gregor Samsa, who one morning “found he had turned into a large verminous insect”?[1]

Franz Kafka’s character is crushed by the contradiction between self-perception and how others see him. He feels human yet is treated like a beast. He appears to be the “other” even though a self akin to those around him is hidden within him. As an ostensibly instinct-driven bug, Gregor Samsa is the personification of nature in contrast with rational humankind and its culture.

The same stigma—that he is at the mercy of his urges—is attached to Aristaeus in Virgil’s ‘Georgics’.[2] He tries to rape Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus; fleeing him, she is bitten by a serpent and dies. Her sisters avenge her by killing Aristaeus’s bees. Seeking to regain the favor of the gods, Aristaeus sacrifices four bulls and four heifers at Eurydice’s tomb. Nine days later, bees swarm forth from the cadavers.

Kafka used the animal form to manifest his character’s nonconformism, his failure to comply with his community’s expectations. Gregor Samsa withdraws from society and its conventions of behavior, so much so that he eventually perishes. The story of Virgil’s Aristaeus, by contrast, comes to a more comforting end. He reflects on his misdeed and demonstrates his return to civilized behavior with a sacrificial offering, which is transformed in turn into the bees that Aristaeus had previously lost due to his actions.

Nature and culture collide in both stories; clear boundaries are drawn and transgressed. There are parallels here with Weinberger’s oeuvre, albeit ones that no more than touch on the thematic core of his self-portrait. Unlike the two narratives, the latter is not about morality but about relations. Still, it has more to do with Virgil’s bees than with Kafka’s bug: the notion that bee colonies originate from the cadavers of cattle was widespread in antiquity. Such nascence of new life out of the passing of the old bears a resemblance to what Weinberger embodies in the photograph. For he is impersonating neither an insectoid nor a Civilized Savage—and certainly not a “little green man”—but the Green Man.

The Green Man is a recurring figure in Christian ecclesiastical architecture.[3] The motif of the face from which leaves sprout melds human and plant in a hybrid creature. Scholars locate its likely provenance in the pre-Christian area. As an expression of polytheistic religious beliefs, the Green Man might have ancestors in Persian, Celtic, and Roman symbolism. Leafage with human figures appeared as a decorative element in Roman temples; Christian churches may subsequently have adopted it to visualize their claim to legitimate succession. Alternatively, such cultural appropriation may have integrated existing local beliefs into Christian iconography. Hence the archetype’s amenability to a range of interpretations: from an echo of the pagan imaginary of a forest deity, a representation of a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature and symbol of growth and prosperity; to the sylvan sprite, an embodiment of dark, untamed, and dangerous nature and antagonist of the light of Christian revelation; to the head overgrown with vegetation, a memento mori reminding the beholder of the impermanence of all existence.[4]

Just as the head of the Green Man stands pars pro toto for the human being, Lois Weinberger’s self-portrait encapsulates the major thematic complexes of his oeuvre. The latter probes existential questions concerning the relationship between subject and world: What constitutes my being? How do formative cultural influences, my own history and that of my family, and geographical circumstances both empower and constrain me? What are the implications of rationalization and the consequent alienation from nature? Are nature and culture actually opposites? Is culture not part of nature? Can I even conceive of my being outside of nature?

Weinberger’s answers reflect his eclectic readings, synthesizing ideas from philosophy (Roland Barthes, Gregory Bateson, Emil M. Cioran, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Martin Heidegger), sociology and cultural studies (Stuart Hall), ethnology (Hans Peter Duerr, Hubert Fichte, Michel Leiris, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Aby Warburg), art and cultural history (Kathleen Basford), biology (Rupert Riedl, Erwin Schrödinger, and Edward O. Wilson), and literature (Jean Genet, Peter Handke, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Laurence Sterne, Henry David Thoreau, and Vergil). As his book recommendations illustrate, he is usually most interested in works of a Post-Structuralist bent that cross disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of holistic approaches (which he also finds in Eastern thinking). He developed a personal ecological philosophy, “an ethico-political articulation […] between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity),” as Guattari sums up his own project of an ecosophy.[5]

Weinberger, too, was “tired of trees,” just like Deleuze and Guattari, who propose to discard the tree as the model for systems of knowledge structured by hierarchies and dichotomies in favor of the rhizome.[6] In contradistinction to the rigid organization of the tree, the rhizome does not exert a regulative authority over interpretations, instead representing a complex ensemble of cross-connections that knows no dependencies but only interrelations. The goal is to shift the focus of interest from categories and states of affairs to vectors in a performance of information. In the same spirit, Weinberger, instead of modeling his oeuvre on the bildungsroman, in which one follows thing from another, grew it as a heterogeneous organism in which a complex coexistence of diverse equipollent narratives can continually engender novel interconnections.

Weinberger’s exhibition lends expression to this anarchic interrelationality. It is the last presentation for which he personally compiled a selection of works; it is not a retrospective that divides his oeuvre into creative periods or tries to spell out its evolutionary logic. Although ‘Basics’ gathers works made between the 1970s and 2020, it puts the focus on reciprocities within this artistic ecosystem. Which currents, then, can we trace in the exhibition’s meandering circular flows?

The “basics” on which most of the works build convey Weinberger’s understanding of nature. Mankind’s use of nature and its symptoms, like environmental pollution and climate change, are increasingly discussed as problematic, suggesting an existential need to subject this relationship to critical scrutiny. Weinberger does not subscribe to those proposals for practical solutions that seek to restore the natural environment, implying an ideal vision of a pure and pristine nature. To his mind, the problem is rooted in much more profound questions concerning humankind’s self-conception. Culture and nature, he believes, are not opposites; man is neither nature’s ruler nor its steward but part of it. Rather than seeking a reconciliation with and return to nature, he aims at a paradigm shift in which the anthropocentric model of this relationship and the projections onto the “environment” bound up with it are supplanted by a holistic perspective, one in which humans come into view as one phenomenon among others of equal value and nature’s autonomy from our projections is recognized.[7] ‘Skulptur La Gomera’ (La Gomera Sculpture), for instance, a shrub with shoe soles hanging on its branches, might be interpreted as Surrealist. But it is actually a realistic representation, one in which human products are self-evidently borne by a plant as though they were leaves or fruit. The same applies to ‘Baumskulptur’ (Tree Sculpture), though this one wears a bucket like a lampshade. ‘Roter Faden’ (Red Thread), too, is a visualization of an all-embracing nature. Birds use the product of culture to build a nest that the tree eventually grows around. In ‘Invasion’, fungi pervade the space of culture that is the exhibition room; in ‘Raum’ (Space), meanwhile, a plant is isolated in an improvised architecture—or, as Franziska Weinberger puts it, the artist “dreamed” himself and the plant “into the white cube.”[8] The grasses plaited together like strands of hair in ‘Zopf’ (Braid) read as a transgressive gesture, as do the watercolors in the series of ‘Wildniskonstruktionen’ (Wilderness Constructions), which expose the idea of the “wilderness” as a human construct and (de)valuing categorization.[9]

By transforming a landfill into a leisure park, Weinberger’s ‘Hiriya Dump’ aims to let the visitor experience the repressed remains of our consumerist dreams as though in an excavation site that presents itself to the eye as a kind of cultural landscape. Culture as nature—that is also the essence of the garden, whose history is as old as human sedentism. The latter was one prerequisite for horticulture and agriculture and gave rise to the concept of property as well as the cultivation of green spaces, which underlies the idea of ordering nature. Order eventually turned into subordination, and the first great civilizations devised suitable ancillary structures such as fences and walls within which they laid out gardens.[10] Gardens were an expression of fertility and prosperity. They were not only retreats from city life but, as representations of empire, also symbolized the ruler’s sovereignty over everything within its bounds. Weinberger counters the metaphoric connotations of the garden with ‘Gebiet I’ (Area I): he collected wild plants growing in urban environments and propagates them on an unused piece of land he has leased for the purpose to resettle them on brownfields, from which he extracts other plants that he releases into the city in turn. By cultivating this “ruderal society,” he accelerates migration flows and negates habitat boundaries arbitrarily imposed on nature. Such efforts to remedy marginalization carry distinct political overtones, as his ‘Portable Gardens’ underscore, PVC bags he filled with soil and set up as refuges for seeds scattered by the wind and animals. Not coincidentally, immigrants often use just such bags to carry all their worldly belongings with them.[11] For his ‘Wild Cube’, by contrast, he draws boundaries of his own. The work is the opposite of the white cube, a literal hortus conclusus.[12] Only this time it is not nature that is locked up in a cage but the human being that is held at a distance, locked out of an asylum for flora and fauna that demonstrates the untamed force of nature.

‘Laubreise’ (Journey of Leaves), meanwhile, draws our attention to processes. It was created in collaboration with Franziska Weinberger, who has been a coauthor on several projects for public settings since 1999.[13] And such cooperation is inherent to the installation: foliage, lop, and algae are piled up in a rectangular block that is slowly decomposed by soil organisms. Crammed into a small space, the quasi-alchemical transformation of “waste” into nutrient-rich humus exudes an air of the abject. The sensually vivid metamorphosis illustrates the transitoriness of all existence—the cycles of becoming and passing away that we, too, are subject to.

A situation of transit is also rendered in the works in the series ‘Wege’ (Paths). Paths are a kind of barrier between tracts of land, but also a connective element. In prefacing the collected edition of his writings with the epigraph “ways—not works” and equating thinking with traveling along paths, and hence with the process of self-knowledge within the world, Heidegger gestures toward a web of movements that limn existence as an act of differentiation.[14] Weinberger here addresses the same structure of vectors, although his prototype are the tunnels carved by bark beetles rather than road networks or veins. The functional logic of these sinuous trajectories eludes us. The function of wayside sheds, by contrast, is readily comprehensible. Weinberger encountered them in Greece, where they serve not only as memorials to victims of accidents, but also to store provisions offered by locals to wayfarers who might need them. The artist reprises this philanthropic idea in his ‘Wegrandhaus’ (Wayside House), which he supplied with poems on pieces of paper on which the visitor can print bark-beetle tunnels (in analogy with the hiker’s passbooks in which stamps earned on the summits document the distances they have covered).

Weinberger’s ‘Hochhaus für Vögel’ (Skyscraper for Birds) is his take on a different kind of dwelling. Transposing the human rationalization of residential real estate into the animal kingdom, he articulates a trenchant critique of the indignity of living conditions subjected to the pressures of efficiency enhancement. Heidegger has characterized dwelling as the essence of being and building as the portrayal of its processual quality.[15] Weinberger, too, takes an interest in this nexus between dwelling and being within the built reality of a house, exploring it in his multipart work ‘Debris Field’, which gathers around seven centuries of history in the form of countless found objects he retrieved from his parents’ farmhouse in Stams, where he grew up. In his psycho-archaeology, he does not just return to his roots, he unearths them: his excavation maps the “debris field” of his personal origins, while also charting a referential system of the everyday lives of peasants.

Weinberger wore a filter mask during the work in the dusty environment that he subsequently gave to his sculpture ‘Bischof’ (Bishop). The figure, whose rootstock face moreover echoes the Green Man motif, emblematizes religious piety—another integral part of peasant life in Stams—as a common ground across cultural differences. Agrarian societies’ dependency on nature forces them to be attentive to it. Observations of inexplicable phenomena used to be explained by religious beliefs or, failing that, by magical powers; a way of thinking not fundamentally different from what Claude Lévi-Strauss has characterized as the “savage mind” in cultures living in close touch with nature, which, instead of rationalizing their fragmentary perceptions, weave them together into a patchwork of stories that let them make direct sense of observations. Inducing or averting certain situations requires the performance of rituals that are said to be immediately effective. Weinberger enacts just such a ritual in ‘Home Voodoo I’, which amalgamates local traditional customs and family mythology with voodoo, Catholic, and pagan practices in a humoristic ceremony: a ritual of purification and liberation whose modus operandi he describes as “chthonic—arising from the Earth.” Something similar is at work in ‘Basics—die Idee einer Ausdehnung’ (Basics—The Idea of an Expansion). The seven sculptures, resting on their backs like unfinished golems awaiting morphogenesis, were molded out of an earthen mix around pieces of wood. The loamy primeval forms suggest both the developmental process and the pleasure of creation, visualizing becoming as the rhythmical performativity of nature and fundamental condition of being.

The principle behind these repeated changes of direction that many of Lois Weinberger’s works retrace is a model that conceives of the essence of being as permanent change: nothing is, everything is becoming, or to put it with Heraclitus, “everything flows.” The exhibition ‘Basics’ may likewise be seen as a scrollwork of interwoven vectors that define possible ways of navigating oneself and one’s thinking through the artist’s oeuvre. This sprawling rhizome was created by one who set forth from a farmstead to become an ornamental blacksmith and metalworker, an actor, and, finally, a visual artist. One who was socialized in a time of cultural upheavals—the 1968 protests were making headlines—and took inspiration from Minimal and Land Art, the Wiener Gruppe, Surrealism, and the Junge Wilde to forge the singular path of his own conceptual art. One who, unlike Joseph Beuys, did not mean to undertake a controlled greening of the city, but embraced rank growth and allowed the marginal to come to the fore. Lois Weinberger was one who became—also becoming a Green Man, adroitly embodying becoming and transience in their inevitability. And he was one who left in order to stay: “When all the plants will have moved away from my / place I destined for them / which happens anyway / I will no longer be the gardener / but innocently use their variety. The essence of my gardening has condensed into a single / flowerpot outdoors / filled with poor soil / a portable garden / to be taken along on inspections in the field and forgotten somewhere. But maybe by planting plants outside my territory in the open I have already foreseen and anticipated / that the concern with plants and gardens can only lead beyond them. Toward the sky / Toward the ground.”[16]

[1] Franz Kafka, ‘The Metamorphosis’ [1915], in ‘The Metamorphosis and Other Stories’, trans. John R. Williams (Hertfordshire, 2011) opening sentence.

[2] Virgil, ‘Georgics’ [29 BCE], in ‘Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid’, trans. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Liberary (Cambridge, Mass., 1916), book 4, verses 281–558.

[3] Lady Raglan coined the term in her essay “The ‘Green Man’ in Church Architecture,” ‘Folklore 50’, no. 1 (March 1939), pp. 45–57. ‘Blattmaske’ (“leaf-mask”) is the more common designation in the German-speaking countries.

[4] Cf. also Kathleen Basford, ‘The Green Man’ (Ipswich, 1978), pp. 9–22.

[5] Félix Guattari, ‘The Three Ecologies’, trans. Ian Pindar/Paul Sutton (London/New York, 2000), p. 28.

[6] Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis/London, 1987), p. 36.

[7] In this respect, Weinberger’s standpoint is akin to positions of speculative realism, which postulate a reality that is independent of man and autonomous, existing without relation to human thought and reason. Yet it also evinces an affinity to the thinking of Heidegger, who, as Hannah Arendt put it, “never thinks ‘about’ something. He thinks something,” Hannah Arendt, ‘Heidegger at Eighty’, in ‘Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding’, 1953–1975, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 2018), p. 422.

[8] Around 1978–79, when this work was made, Lois Weinberger was still living in the Tyrolean countryside; he did not start showing his works in exhibitions until 1980.

[9] It is evaluative in the sense that the idea of “wilderness” makes sense only from the vantage point of culture.

[10] The term “paradise”, for example, derives from the Avestan pairi-da?za, which may be literally translated as “walled enclosure” and was the name for Persian royal gardens in antiquity.

[11] Similarly, ‘Stein mit Federn’ (Stone with Feathers), a literal “flying stone,” is an unmistakably political work.

[12] Latin for “enclosed” or “closed garden.”

[13] The public interest in their respective roles in making the works eventually leads them to the decision to desist from subsuming what remain shared intellectual processes under a shared authorship in order to eliminate the distraction from the essential substance of the works.

[14] “Time and again, thinking follows in the same writings, or goes by its own attempts on the trail where the Fieldpath passes through the field […] The expanse of all grown things which dwell around the Fieldpath bestows the world.” Martin Heidegger, ‘The Fieldpath,’ trans. Berit Mexia, ‘Journal of Chinese Philosophy’ 13, no. 4 (December 1986), pp. 455–58.

[15] “Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope, looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it its wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter-nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the ‘tree of the dead’—for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum—and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still uses its tools and frames as things, built the farmhouse.” Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking,’ in ‘Poetry, Language, Thought’, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971), p. 160.

[16] Lois Weinberger, ‘Notes from the Hortus’ (Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997), p. 19; translation modified based on the original: ‘Lois Weinberger, Vienna 1996,’ in ‘Lois & Franziska Weinberger,’ exh. cat., Kunstverein Hannover; Villa Merkel, Esslingen (Hannover, 2003), p. 85.

Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson

Exhibition catalogue:

Lois Weinberger – Basics

Edited by Stella Rollig and Severin Dünser

Including texts by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Catherine David, Severin Dünser, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stella Rollig and Philippe Van Cauteren

Graphic design by Astrid Seme, Vienna

German/English

Hardcover with paper changes, 24 × 31 cm, 232 pages, 256 illustrations

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, 2021

ISBN 978-3-903327-22-1

Quick tour through the show (video)

‘Liquidity’

Friday, 16 July 2021 from 8 pm

FLUC, Praterstern 5, Vienna

Featuring works by Karoline Dausien, Sophie Gogl, Birke Gorm, Lena Henke, Maurício Ianês, Lukas Posch, Hans Schabus, Christian Schwarzwald, Katharina Schilling & Philipp Lossau, Johanna Charlotte Trede and Julian Turner; curated by Olympia Tzortzi & Severin Dünser

Going through several lockdowns made clear, how essential collective experiences are for everyone. In response, "Liquidity" repeats a concept from 2018, but this time against the backdrop of (supposably) overcome social restrictions:

Social ties are established while drinking, people communicate and interact. The choice of drinks thereby also defines the relation of the participants among each other, while the rituals connected to them force the structure of the way of being together. The artists of the exhibition conceived and appropriated a variety of drinks, respectively formulated instructions on how to use them. What normally accompanies the communication, becomes the subject matter in this participative exhibition. In the tradition of relational aesthetics it transforms a conversation piece into a social sculpture – and the other way around.

‘On Heavy Rotation’

With works by Keren Cytter, Panayiotis Loukas, Matthias Noggler, Malvina Panagiotidi, Vasilis Papageorgiou, Lia Perjovschi, Evelyn Plaschg, Socratis Socratous, Nadim Vardag and Gernot Wieland; curated by Severin Dünser and Olympia Tzortzi

Callirrhoë, Athens

2 November 2020 – 23 January 2021

The exhibition’s point of departure is a motion, that is constantly accelerated this year: the rotation on one’s own axis. Conditioned by the pandemic and the accompanying limitations, spinning around became a collective experience. Between a steadily repeated mental rotation and a physical reeling off of recurring processes, a dynamic arises, that resembles the experience of a hall of mirrors. Introspection and self-awareness generate a turning point, that affects the individual and – like the dance of a derwish – results in fluctuating between vertigo and contemplative trance. The exhibition follows these rotational movements on the basis of several works and tries to establish intersections between their thematic radii.
For the exhibition, we either invited artists to produce new works, selected works that were made during the pandemic or chose older pieces that gain new layers of significance in the context of the current health crisis’ epiphenomenons:
“The Fools” for example were created by Malvina Panagiotidi in 2018. The series of clay figurines illustrates the imaginary creatures haunting on the Greek islands. Symbolically standing for the gaps between what we encounter and what we know, and how these gaps are filled with speculations that can turn into monsters, they represent the things that take on a life of their own in our heads. One of the creatures of Panagiotidi is of special interest: A horned figure with a snake-like lower body-half, that eats its own tail. It resembles the pose of the Ouroboros, that symbolizes autarky and a never-ending cycle of life, death and rebirth.
Also the story of Keren Cytter’s film “Der Spiegel“ (The Mirror, 2007) moves in a circular course without a beginning or an end. Set in an apartment, her small drama evolves around a 42-year-old woman facing her aging, being rejected by her crush and not interested in the man who loves her. By blending narration and analyzation of the filmic medium into each other, the protagonists are objects and subjects at the same time - turning the plot into a self-aware perpetual motion machine, that keeps the viewer in a meta-poetic, existentialist loop.
A drastically reduced social life combined with a physical threat induces a continuous reflection of the self as a soul attached to a potentially weak body. This very existence in that one body we own is a point of departure of Evelyn Plaschg’s paintings. Leaving imagery of idealized bodies behind, her abstractions of female physicalities are an effort to merge the mental and the corporal. Her self-explorations are self-empowerments, that are backed by a trust in one’s own feelings as a valid basis for joyfull decision-making – and oppose society’s normative codes of behavior.
Our relation to society is also addressed in Gernot Wieland’s film “Ink in Milk” (2018). In it, the artist is the narrator of various poetic, absurd and tragicomical stories that are illustrated with child-like drawings, diagrams, photos and plasticine animations. They deal with the individual’s adaptation to dominant ideologies and structures of power. With his highly subjective monologue, Wieland reveals how our perception of reality, truth and language affect us in constructing our image of the self through our interpretation of the past.
Matthias Noggler employs diverse visual genres and styles to generate figurative and abstract compositions that describe contemporary urban milieus and more intimate domestic settings. The outside world is absent in his new works, that create a somnambule atmosphere of artificiality and psychological tension. The depicted characters are gathered at home, engaged in daily routines or immersed within themselves. The drawings establish the interior as a place of subconscious conflict and silent enchantment, offering an ambivalent view on the complex mechanisms of subjectivity and social self.
Concepts of togetherness, communication and loneliness are the targets of Vasilis Papageorgiou’ artistic investigations. He focusses on semi-private and semi-public spaces such as bars, small casinos or football stadiums where people reclaim the idea of free time and the right to be alone together. Creating new narratives which reflect our everyday, he rethinks and rearticulates the imagery of those places. Also his very recent sculptures are abstractions of support structures, in this case chairs. With dolphins on one seat, that symbolize sociability, safety, security and salvation, and the absence of a body manifested in a deposited blouse on the other, they remind us of the stability we are lacking without company or a counterpart.
In his installation, Socratis Socratous also deals with the idea of privacy and seclusion of the interior. Inspired by the US-American poet Emily Dickinson, who spent most of her life in the isolation of her bedroom, Socratous manifests the idea of detachment in one crucial element: a door. It’s an aluminium door in the style of the time around 1920 – the time of the Spanish flu. There is a short sentence on the door: “There is no place like home”. It refers to a famous sentence in the 1939 movie “The Wizard of Oz”, that triggered the homecoming of its main protagonist. In the film, the sentence stays unclear in considering “home” a good or bad situation (that the protagonist ran away from before). Also Socratous leaves it unclear, if it’s better to be at home in isolation, satisfy one’s desires by escapisms or search for oneself in the company of others. He just wants to let us know, that not everyone has a home to hide at.
For Sigmund Freud, the uncanny locates the strangeness in the ordinary. In German, the ‘uncanny’ is literally the ‘unhomely’. Strangely familiar are also the worlds that Panayiotis Loukas creates. Often characterized as “fairytale-like”, they mix our common surroundings with the mystical and the imaginary. In “The Visitor” (2015), an object consisting of geometrical forms is about to enter a rural home through a door. An object becomes a subject here, the subconscious takes over reality and turns it into a psychedelic fever dream.
How our reality is shaped is also the topic of Nadim Vardag’s works. The technique of drypoint etching is used by the artist as means of a picture language that engages with the conditions of visual systems and the grids and structures that order our world and its images. In his series, the textile-like structures are based on a grid and densify towards knots or diverge into web-like formations. The structuring visual aids – the lines of the grid – thus become the motive of the image themselves. Metaphorically, those images could be interpreted as being entangled in fixed frameworks – or in a situation of insecure balance between order and chaos.
Bringing order into chaos is a quest for knowledge that Lia Perjovschi persues with a series she started in the late 1990ies. Interested in the accumulation and transfer of information, she creates mind maps that organize and memorize it. Her clouds of keywords and notes simplify complexities by clearly laying out relations and interconnections. The works on display were made in 2020 as a “research from the beginning till the relaxation” and express a subjective history revealing the artist’s particular view of the current situation.

The exhibition was kindly supported by the Federal Ministry of the Republic of Austria for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport

Eva Grubinger

‘Malady of the Infinite’

Belvedere 21, Vienna

22 November, 2019 – 13 April, 2020

The cockpit sticks up in the air, the hull is already under water. In spite of this, the superyacht dominates the space, held in check only by several mines that protrude from the floor, as if floating on the ocean. It is Eva Grubinger’s artistic trademark to defamiliarize and activate objects via enlargement, change of material, reduction, or decontextualization. Here, too, these means are used to create a sculptural scene combining poetic lightness with real political relevance.
The exhibition also reflects a sociopolitical and psychosocial mood known as anomie, a situation in which societal norms are weakened or entirely lacking, giving no moral orientation. In this way, the dominance of global capitalism, paired with neoliberalism, creates a lack of solidarity that runs through all strata of society. This is accompanied by the notion of a boundless horizon of possibilities that promises all individuals self-determination and self-realization, but which ultimately leads to an unlimited longing that cannot be satisfied in material terms and that grows ever stronger. Sociologist Émile Durkheim speaks in this context of a “malady of the infinite.”
Grubinger articulates this mood via a luxury object that neither functions nor satisfies. Even the yacht—a symbol of power, dominance, autonomy, and advanced capitalism—is not immune to the dangers posed by those with nothing left to lose. For not only the superrich suffer the malady of the infinite. Even the middle classes have fallen victim to the neoliberal wish machine. They are now in existential crisis, hollowed out by the resulting economic injustice. And the precariat is increasingly frustrated by ever more obvious inequality, leading it to turn its back on ethical behavior.
Grubinger’s sculptural ensemble conveys a feeling of tension and grim foreboding. The ocean as a setting makes room for contradictory associations including conquest, colonialism, desire, and freedom. Where not only leisure activities like sailing and travel taken place, but also fishing, transport, piracy, and human trafficking, Grubinger stages a conflict of power and powerlessness. Malady of the Infinite paints a picture of structural inequality, of endless longing with no hope of fulfillment for rich or poor, for tycoons or pirates. With this exhibition, the artist creates a striking parable on our fraught times.

Eva Grubinger (born 1970 in Salzburg) studied at Berlin’s University of the Arts with VALIE EXPORT and Katharina Sieverding (1989–1995). Since the mid-1990s, her work has been shown in museum and gallery exhibitions internationally, including solo shows at Bloomberg SPACE, London (2016), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015), Belvedere, Vienna (2012), ZKM – Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe (2011), Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2009), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2007), Berlinische Galerie (2004), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2003), Kiasma Museum, Helsinki (2001). Also many group shows in Austria and abroad, including: Neues Museum, Nuremberg (2019), Busan Biennale (2018), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2014, 2015), Witte de With – Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2014), Marrakech Biennale (2012), Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (2011), Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2010), Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois (2009), Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg (2009), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2008), Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2005), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2002). The artist lives and works in Berlin.

Exhibition catalogue:
Eva Grubinger – Malady of the Infinite
Edited by Stella Rollig and Severin Dünser
Including Texts by Severin Dünser, Chus Martínez, Stella Rollig and Jan Verwoert
Graphic design by Heimann + Schwantes, Berlin
German/English
Swiss hardcover, 23 × 30 cm, 176 pages, ca. 150 illustrations
Koenig Books Ltd, London, 2019
ISBN 978-3-903114-95-1

Henrike Naumann

‘Das Reich’

Belvedere 21, Vienna

26 September, 2019 – 12 January, 2020

Henrike Naumann grew up in Zwickau, as the political end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was approaching and the state was absorbed into a reunified Germany. She processed the experiences of her youth, which straddled hedonism, consumer culture and increasing right-wing radicalization, into installations in several exhibitions. As an artist, she is interested in the design vocabulary that these everyday extremes have evoked in the populace. To what extent do furniture and objects reflect an attitude and a history? In alternative history scenarios, Naumann examines the interplay of aesthetics and ideology and creates walk-in spaces where it can be experienced.
The starting point for her exhibition “Das Reich” in Belvedere 21 is the year 1990: The Reich Citizens movement refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and quickly takes control after reunification. Austria soon joins the reconstituted German Reich. Henrike Naumann sketches this fictional scenario in an immersive spatial installation consisting of furniture, home accessories, decor elements and videos. Here the Reich (Citizens‘) Chancellory, staged as a Germanic Stonehenge, coexists with home videos by the National Socialist Underground and of partygoers in Ibiza, a 1990s furniture store and all manner of finca chic. The exhibition can be read as a psychogram of an alternative worldview, which alarmingly resembles the worlds of thought of today’s extreme right-wing movements.

“Anschluss ’90”

With her walk-in installation, Henrike Naumann develops a fictional scenario in which the Reich Citizens take control over reunified Germany in 1990 and Austria decides without hesitation to join the newly reinstated German Reich. The reawakened feeling of racial (völkisch) unity is celebrated with euphoria, but not by parades as in 1938 – instead, it finds expression in an exuberant consumer culture. “I shop, therefore I am!” is the motto, which derives the power to form a new Germanicness (Germanentum) from a total shopping spree. Because just as in East Germany, furniture stores are popping up like mushrooms in Austria. Instead of “just living,” Germanness is experienced as a hedonistic lifestyle that can be acquired as a product.
In her installation “Anschluss ’90”, which was first presented at the “steirischer herbst” contemporary art festival in 2018, Henrike Naumann stages the display floor of a furniture store that opened shortly after the hypothetical re-annexation in 1990. Furniture, amenities, books, and decor elements merge to reflect a society that wishes to express its identity founded on German nationalism and consumerism even in its home furnishings. Henrike Naumann’s alternative history scenario clarifies the ruptures that a neglected processing of German/Austrian history has left behind, and which still provide fertile ground for populist and radical right-wing politics.

“Terror”

This video is the counterpart to “Amnesia”, which was also produced in 2012. While in that film young people enjoy themselves in Ibiza, “Terror” takes place in Jena. In 1992, two young men and a young woman experience their “last summer of innocence,” as Henrike Naumann puts it, before ultimately becoming radicalized. In the names of the protagonists — Beate, Böhni and Uwe — Naumann makes reference to Beate Zschäpe, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, the trio who carried out right-wing terrorist attacks and murders as the “National-Socialist Underground” beginning in 1999.
“Terror” begins with a scene in which the three steal a VHS video camera. They go on to document their everyday life: in their Neo-Nazi teen bedroom surrounded by the swastika flag, stuffed animals, and an ALF greeting card, they pass the time reading an article in the teen magazine “Bravo”, an article about the dangers of Ecstasy and pranks. Beate boxes against a sofa while the others cheer her on. Uwe poses for the camera and shouts “Sieg Heil!” while pulling up the right arm of a plush Pink Panther over and over again. Finally the video shows them breaking into an abandoned school. Incapable of articulating their affection, they seek physical contact through tussling before they begin indiscriminately destroying things (“88, here we go!”). In the final scene, Böhni and Uwe surprise Beate with four pistols arranged in a swastika.
Henrike Naumann juxtaposes the sexual self-discovery of the young protagonists with the question of individual responsibility for one’s political education. In her video, the artist explores the banality of evil by mimicking the look of a VHS home video, making moments of creeping right-wing radicalization graspable.

“Amnesia”

In contrast to “Terror,” “Amnesia” takes place in 1992 on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Here, the circle of protagonists expands to include a young man. However, alongside Bianca, Sven and Dave, Mike only takes on the passive role of cameraman. The young people move into their hotel room. They gather around a table to smoke and talk about the stresses and strains of their journey. A party mood sets in: they bellow “Ibiza 92,” fool around, drink hard liquor, make out, do lines of cocaine, get dressed up, and move to the “Amnesia,” Ibiza‘s hottest club. There, they dance to electronic beats, smoke, and drink individually. Bianca loses track of Sven and Dave and finds them again embracing tightly and kissing. She goes back to the dance floor and loses herself in moving to the music under the influence of drugs. In the empty club, she throws a vase at a glass pyramid in which she had been looking at herself earlier.
There are several parallels between the video works “Terror” and “Amnesia”. These include the motif of destroying one’s own reflection as well as aggressive, excessive behavior caused by boredom. The young people are also similar in terms of the extremism they develop in the course of finding an identity. In Ibiza, they seek healing in intoxication and forgetting, in the dissolution of the old ego through opening up to a new one – in contrast to connecting with a racial (völkisch) identity that is sought in Jena in the past. “I look into the question of where the innocence of the three young Neo-Nazis ends – and the responsibility of non-political hedonists begins,” says Naumann of her video works. And even today, the combination of Ibiza and partying can quickly lead to questions of political responsibility.

“Das Reich”

Henrike Naumann’s extensive installation “Das Reich” was first presented in the banquet hall of the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin. It is a symbolic place, where the reunification treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) regarding the dissolution of the GDR, its entry into the FRG, and German reunification was signed in 1990. But not everyone agrees to this particular reunification: the Reich Citizens do not recognize the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and insist on the continued existence of the German Reich. In their eyes, an injustice has befallen the “German people”: they see themselves as an endangered indigenous community in an occupied country and ask the United Nations for support against violations of international law. They stockpile weapons and munitions for Day X, when the final battle will come and the German Reich will rise again.
“Das Reich” is Naumann’s outline of a dystopia in which the Reich Citizens actually take over the business of government in 1990. Within this scenario, the walk-in ensemble consisting of cupboards, shelves, and glass cabinets is arranged like Stonehenge in memory of the early years of the Fourth Reich along with memorabilia from the second Anschluss of Austria in 1990. Naumann’s “Das Reich” stages the provisional Reich (Citizens’) Chancellery as an ethnic (völkisch) shrine. In this monument to Germanicness, nationalist conspiracy theories intersect with the destinies of individuals and with the ruptures in German history.

Henrike Naumann was born in Zwickau in 1984. She lives and works in Berlin. Her works have recently appeared at such venues as Kunstverein Hannover, KOW (Berlin), Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach), MMK (Frankfurt am Main), steirischer herbst (Graz), the Busan Biennale, the Ghetto Biennale (Port-au-Prince), and the Musée d’Art Contemporain et Multimédia (Kinshasa).

‘On the New – Young Art from Vienna’

Featuring works by Sasha Auerbakh, Anna-Sophie Berger, Cäcilia Brown, Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin, Melanie Ebenhoch, Johannes Gierlinger, Birke Gorm, Maureen Kaegi, Barbara Kapusta, Angelika Loderer, Nana Mandl, Matthias Noggler, Lukas Posch, Lucia Elena Průša, Rosa Rendl & Lonely Boys, Marina Sula, Philipp Timischl and Edin Zenun; curated by Severin Dünser and Luisa Ziaja

Kunstraum Innsbruck

4 July – 31 August, 2019

In Vienna there is a varied and vibrant practice of art production and presentation by a new generation. “On the New – Young Art from Vienna” aims to reflect the vitality of Vienna’s art communities: It provides an insight into the practices of eighteen artists up to the age of thirty-five. Based on “On the New – Young Scenes in Vienna”, that was on display at Belvedere 21 in spring 2019, the concept and selection for this exhibition were adapted to the spatial possibilities at Kunstraum Innsbruck. In general, the curators Severin Dünser and Luisa Ziaja seeked to contextualize the different approaches and attitudes of various protagonists in relation to the forms of expression they use – even if it is impossible to reproduce the young Viennese art production in all its’ variety within a single exhibition.

The exhibition was titled “On the New” in full awareness of the difficulties posed by the connotations associated with such terms as “new”, “young”, and “scene”, because these also reflect the difficulties of the format itself. The “new” in art is a highly charged concept in many ways. In modernism, it paradigmatically represents the endeavor of the artistic avantgardes to reject and overcome preceding movements, and to create not only a visionary new art, but to shape the individual and even the world anew. By contrast, pluralism, polyphony and multiperspectivity became key concepts of a postmodernist aesthetic that dismantled the boundaries between genres, media, high culture and popular culture, between art and the everyday. Due to a combination of overstimulation (through digital media, virally circulating images or content) and sheer exhaustion (through the constant recycling of cultural forms of expression) the very concept of the new has now been all but eradicated from contemporary thinking. The present has become so fully inundated by the past that any differentiation between them has been eroded. Buried, too, is the knowledge that none of this is new, that innovation was once a real possibility, and that a different reality was once actually conceivable. So the concept of the new involves a clash of different discourses and schools of thought, which might be taken as the framework for current artistic production. At the same time, the quotidian nature of this term also arouses expectations that may well be thwarted. It is this discrepancy and the resulting need for discussion that the curators have chosen to evoke in choosing a title that not only cites Boris Groys directly, but also addresses issues far beyond his approach.

While searching for the “new” in the studios of the younger Viennese artist, some tendencies became clear: Craftsmanship and a mastery of traditional techniques are key to many of the works shown here, often in conjunction with experimenting with materials and their specific qualities. Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin, for instance, creates lucid paintings of old-master perfection, while Edin Zenun works in oils, clay and pigment to produce works that raise questions about the immanent painterly nature of both the figurative and the abstract. Angelika Loderer, on the other hand, experiments with means drawn from the craft of metal-casting, like casting sand, pressing and stamping it into autonomous temporary sculptures. Meanwhile, Sasha Auerbakh does not follow the specific qualities or characteristics of her material so much as she obsessively overrides them. Cäcilia Brown plays with the contradictory connotations of the fleeting and the permanent, when she casts cardboard boxes that serve as temporary night shelters in concrete. And in Birke Gorm’s vase-like sand sculptures and wall pieces made of jute sacks, the aesthetics of the haptic and of craftmanship meet the digital.

The constraints of digitality and the ever more gapless incorporation in various media dispositifs are reflected either directly or indirectly in a number of works. Maureen Kaegi, for example, devotes her meticulous drawings, created through analogue processes, to the perceptual phenomena of the digital noise that she counters with contemplative depths. Lukas Posch, by contrast, addresses with his paintings the invasively stimulating effects of the digital on the individual’s body and mind, while Nana Mandl explores the faultlines of present-day visuality by recoupling the inflationary production and distribution of digital images to the analogue realm in her largescale material collages.

The internet offers freedoms and endless possibilities for development, fulfilment, information, entertainment and consumerism. The flawlessness of the digital exerts an enormous appeal, even on those who are aware that there are algorithms in play, which are aimed at creating a frictionless experience, while manipulating our online behavior. Even the most savvy users are so tempted by what the internet has to offer that they end up spending a great deal of their spare time online. That in itself involves a certain disembodiment, an alienation from one’s own physis. Running against the tide of this development, however, corporeality seems to be an important theme for several of the artists in the exhibition. Such as Birke Gorm, who translates the idealization of the digital into the imperfection of the physical, with particular emphasis on the aspect of manual labor. The work of Lucia Elena Průša addresses subjective perception of time triggered by bodily processes. For Barbara Kapusta, the body is relevant as a connecting link between the internal and the external. Cäcilia Brown places the body and its needs in relation to the public space, while Marina Sula is interested in how behaviors and attitudes can be altered by architectural structures. She sees the body as a biomass formed by genetic materials and external influences, and also reflects on it as an expression of belonging as well as in terms of a machine and working instrument whose efficiency increase and (self-) discipline leads to alienation from it. Sula contrasts the transformation of the body through prostheses as optimization and concomitant self-fragmentation with its presence as a vehicle for potential social interaction.

For Anna-Sophie Berger, too, physical presence is a factor within the context of her own mobility between various geographic centres of her life. This results in a certain diremption between the cosmopolitan and the rooted in the construction of identity—raising the question of belonging, which is also addressed by some of the other artists in the exhibition. Johannes Gierlinger, for instance, looks at past and present forms of political radicalization within the context of national identity models. Matthias Noggler, on the other hand, describes belonging as a group-dynamic process underpinned by mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion (a factor that can also be found in the work of Lucia Elena Průša), spawning forms of subjectification. Birke Gorm, by contrast, sees the individual as being exposed to social norms and expectations and having to react accordingly by taking a demonstrative stance. Rosa Rendl’s photographs centre around identity and the way it is conveyed, as well as focusing on the construction of authenticity, while Melanie Ebenhoch explores the reciprocal effects between the reception of artworks and the supposed projections onto the figure of the artist behind them as the starting point for her reflections on painting as a medium of representation. Philipp Timischl, who focuses on issues of origin and sexuality in terms of how these factors influence a sense of social belonging, channels the question of constructing identity into reflections on representation, respectively emancipation through forms of self-exposion.

Formulating notions of belonging and identity is something that goes hand in hand with processes of individualization. In the exhibition, this manifests itself not only on the meta-level of the conditions that underly the construction of identity. Instead, it is also evident in the endeavors to artistically express the individuality of one’s own identity beyond the bounds of universal validities and objectivities. In contrast to the individual mythologies outlined by the likes of Szeemann, there is little to be found herein the way of the archetypical or the obsessive, though some of the artists in the exhibition do indicate a tendency to withdraw into the private and subjective sphere. Bouyed by a desire for authenticity, emotions and empathy take centre stage in works putting the human condition of the individual in focus. That can be felt as keenly in the music videos of Lonely Boys as it can in the inner landscapes that Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin spreads out before us. Even when Lucia Elena Průša presents time as a subjective notion, or when Sasha Auerbakh explores the psychological outlier of unrequited love, or Barbara Kapusta merges desire, lust and pain in a cognitive dissonance, or Philipp Timischl bundles personal emotional states into a kind of retrospective introspective—then states of mind become expressions of worldviews that include the wider whole in the existential.